After 18 months in office, people are still trying to figure out who is Barack Obama. While he seems terribly comfortable with himself, the majority of Americans do not seem to be comfortable with him.
White Kansas-born mother, black Kenyan father, raised here and there, Hawaii and Indonesia, educated here and there, California, New York and Cambridge; he seems to be without roots and difficult to identify with.
Everyone’s strength is potential weakness; everyone’s weakness potential strength. Barack Obama was elected President in what has been termed a post-racial United States; race was always present, but rarely directly mentioned during the campaign.
He is the culmination of the Joshua Generation, those who were not active in the civil rights movement but who benefitted from its activism. (The term comes from Jewish history, referring to those who did not take part in the exodus but entered the Promised Land.) He has purposefully distanced himself from leaders of the civil rights movement like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, many of whom supported Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries.
There was no rainbow coalition behind him. His great strength is to benefit from being the first African-American President while enabling many voters to go beyond racial considerations. The post-racial allows him to avoid the residual antagonisms of the culture clashes of the 1960’s amid the turmoil of desegregation.
On the other hand, and here comes the weakness, it also takes Barack Obama out of history. The United States is a country of immigrants and movers. Few people live in the same area as their parents or grandparents. And yet, there is history, there are roots.
We can understand someone moving from Detroit to California; we can understand a third generation Italian; we can understand a refugee from Haiti. What we can’t understand is Barack Hussein Obama because we cannot understand his roots. In one sense, he epitomizes the free American who changes addresses every few years. But in another sense, this restlessness makes us uncomfortable.
Harry Truman was from Missouri, Dwight Eisenhower from Kansas, Jack Kennedy from Massachusetts, Lyndon Johnson from Texas, Richard Nixon from California, Jimmy Carter from Georgia, Ronald Reagan from California, The Bushes from Connecticut, Texas and Maine; Bill Clinton from Arkansas. We can identify the men with places. Barack Obama from Hyde Park, Illinois?
Barack Obama is not only post-racial, he is also post-historical. He is having trouble finding followers today because of a lack of commonality. Being post-racial and post-historical means being all things to all people, which, for the moment, is working to his disadvantage.
Americans are immigrants and movers, but they do understand roots. One can be cosmopolitan and grounded at the same time, universal and particular. President Obama is having the worst of both worlds. Joshua had a tribe, Obama has none.
