Uppity

Some people who write for the NYT must not read it. Or maybe they just don't read Maureen Dowd. Several weeks ago she made a point that I had been saying to Paul all week. I kicked myself for not having blogged it first (which is sort of a weird image, when you think about it, because physically it is really hard to do unless you are gymnast or have a cool sense of yourself as not strictly confined to what is held in by your skin, like, you recognize yourself in your prostheses--computer, notebooks, stuff, bionic leg, Second Life avatar, media image, that sort of thing).

Anyway, the point: some commentators are really puzzled by the fact that Obama gets stuck with the label "elitist" when more privileged and elite folks like the Clintons, Bushes, and John McCain escape it. This is not difficult, people. IT'S BECAUSE HE IS BLACK. "Elite" is a code word for "uppity" and everyone in the US over 10 years old knows exactly what word follows "uppity." Obama can be pegged as elite because of the racist supposition that he is out of place, that he has risen above himself.

Comments

[patrick j. mullins]

Dowd only mentioned, as I recall, that Bill Clinton 'at least didn't say uppity', but she's mentioned the elitism that Obama practises quite specifically--in his attesmpt to pander to Penna. voters while trying not to overeat their greasy food, etc.

Why agonize over what the politicians are doing? Of course Obama is elitists, but that shouldn't bother anybody, they should just accept that he is. The Clintons are too, and they pander to a faretheewell. This post is like the one where you concluded 'a black man must be president.' Likewise, some would say 'a woman must be president.'

But neither must be president. One of them might be, and that is all that that hill of beans amounts to. Both campaigns spend all the time they have hoping to figure out how to smear the other most slyly, so it won't look quite as bad as the way the other one is trying to smear them.

That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know...\

Anyway, racism, sexism, homophobia--these three, and the greatest of these is...no, not that, but rather..they are all fair game..

Nobody seems to see that it has been frankly very informative and instructive to see the stark racial divide due to Hillary's staying in the race. It has exposed it like nothing else ever has, it has proved that all forms of post-racism as espoused by many elitists and cornpones alike, are strictly alive and well. It seems obvious to me that seeing that this is the case beyond a shadow of a doubt shows what there is to deal with a lot better than not seeing it. People in these votes were not pretending to vote for anybody but a black person in many cases; and people were not pretending to vote for anybody but a white person in many cases. The hateful fact is for the 'political elitists' is that the black vote and the white vote are EXACTLY alike in all practical terms, and you have to introduce the long view looking past, and talk about percentage of racial injustices to pretend that it is any different. And you would still be 'right', but that again is some obscure, arcane thing by now compared to the stark facts; those exit polls showed what a lot of people are saying they are going to do in the general election. This information is useful. Yes, there has been an attempt on Clinton's part to 'get the white vote', but she could not have 'gotten it' in such large quantity had she merely played a little dirty pool (and they've both played a lot of it. They are both race-mongerers and they both know it.)

[Jodi]

Patrick--

I don't recall saying 'a black man must be president' or anything like that. Maybe you are mixing me up with someone else?

Elitism isn't the same as pandering.

My point involves how an accusation sticks, what makes it sticky, what makes it resonate, why it attaches to some rather than others.

Now, are they 'both race mongers'--I assume you mean both Clinton and Obama. It seems to me (and a billion others) that Obama has tried to be post-race. With that said, then your point about Hillary's staying in the race revealing the pervasive extend of racism and its role strikes me as correct.

[patrick j. mullins]

This was the passage, but I may well not have understood what you meant. It was on the Rev. Wright post:

"But my best guess is that Obama will have to find a way to jettison the stance of beyond race, the stance that race doesn't matter. The view, then, should not be that anyone can be president regardless of race. It should be that a black man should be president."

Okay, I definitely got 'must' wrong, but it seems close enough to the intent. Because a black man should not be president in particular, unless it's THIS black man. At least right now. Maybe sometime, but it doesn't play unless it's about THIS black man.

But trying to be post-race, while admirable, is not anything unless it lasts. It didn't. He's lucked up from good fortune before he had to try to wint the voters that weren't his base. That's what TPM and all the others talking about his 'Appalachian problem' was all about.

I didn't say elitism and pandering were the same, rather they could exist simultaneously. In these cases, they exist simultaneously in both campaigns. Both are elitist, but Obama's style is called 'elitist' because he appeals to voters who are adjudged elitist as opposed to white crackers in West Virginia, and she managed to conceal her own elitism from them, because her cynicism at this sort of thing knows no bounds, of course. I don't care that much about the 'sincerity' of either one of them, they're both fully corruptible, and she's definitely all the way down the block anyway. He didn't stay on message, though, continued none of the stuff about post-race until it was convenient, and abandoned Wright, while many elitist supporters analyzed and defended Wright for reasons that are important to a small group of select people, but that don't mean anything to large blocs of voters, and Obama knows this. That's why it just matters whether Obama will know how to govern intelligently or not. I have no reason to think he will, although I'll vote for him and think he's intelligent, of course. okay, like that.

[nick]

Not having read the column in question I may be being unfair to Dowd in what follows, but--her point strikes me as limited, in that she's avoiding an analysis that's common on the left/liberal blog, an analysis that's rather damning to her own work.
Obama gets called an "elitist" because he's a Democrat, because Democrats are "elitsts" and unmanly [Gore, Kerry], insufficiently American, and Republicans [Bush] are "regular guys"--and this tedious dichotomy has been established by mainstream political commentators, prominent among them Dowd herself, through relentless repetition over the past ten years or so. This is just the basic binary bullshit of post-Clinton politics. To be an elitist is like being a liberal: it's a badge of political death; either they make it stick or they don't, and if it sticks, you're fucked. Democrats are attacked this way, in other words, because it's been shown to work; the less savvy simply repeat the terms of the attack, confusing them with an actual political analysis.

When Dowd dubs Obama "Obambi" (or when she sees Hillary as insufficiently feminine--the other side of the same rhetorical coin), she's participating in the game of dismissing Democrats as elitists. The moment of attention to race that you cite, however locally perceptive, seems to me to be merely noticing one move in the game (yes, this is how we call a black man elitist in America). Describing one move doesn't absolve Dowd for her role in the game as a whole.

[Jodi]

I'm not trying to absolve Dowd (which would also be something rather strange and impossible). My point is only about the specificity of the charge of elitist against Obama.

Patrick, my claim in the passage you describe is normative and general. And I applied it to the specific case in order to point out the limits of a post-race strategy. Another way of phrasing the ideas of that last sentence: a candidate should find ways of turning their specific raced and gendered experiences into universals; these experiences should not be erased as unimportant or held out as characteristics of a part, but championed as elements of all of us or key attributes of a leader for all of us. Without that kind of message, any identity attribute plays into the worse forms of divisive identity politics.

Dejan--I'm deleting your comment. I don't want I cite to show up in google searches that put that word with Obama.

[patrick j. mullins]

I think nick's comment is sketchy at best. Dowd plays them all, all persuasions and parties, as the cartoon characters they are (even if not only) and does it with a real voice. The one point is that I do agree that it can be seen as 'elitism' but not because Obama is a black. This doesn't quite work if only because of John Kerry with the elitism that wouldn't stop and couldn't get it up. Anyway, everybody knows Dowd is a Democrat and if she does a silly reverie about Kerry in his silk pajamas with Te-ray-za and how he 'married up' (which doesn't bring him back down to 'roots' or anything radical like that), that never stops her extraordinary public service and delight in quoting 'Dubya's' hideous grammar every time it comes up. Some of it has to do with how a bloc perceives something, not just personal taste. At least she doesn't call the Democrats 'odious' and 'world-destroyers' in the same way she does the Republicans.

Jodi, yes, I see what you are talking about. I don't know if it's ever been done, because loud, powerful countries don't listen, and what you are talking about requires listening. Americans are screaming in chatrooms, and this is not subtlety. That's why all the players have to play by the rules. Life does go on, but I admit it's somehow easy to imagine that it wouldn't.

[parody center]

That's aright Jodianne, I will resolve the work dispute with my correspondent internally.

[va]

I'm not sure that Obama-as-elitist has quite stuck. If it has stick, who's sticking it to him? Bill Clinton? It's possible, of course, that I simply have trouble imagining others imagine Obama as like a George Plimpton.

BTW, the scathing significance of "Obambi" is utterly lost on me. All I can think is that Dowd gets off attaching "bi" to a Democrat's name.

[McKenzie Wark]

Everybody at the Times reads Maureen Dowd; but nobody at the Times will admit to reading Maureen Dowd.

[patrick j. mullins]

Everybody at the Times reads Maureen Dowd; but nobody at the Times will admit to reading Maureen Dowd.

I doubt it.

The fact is, she really can write and can precede almost everybody else. Bob Herbert writes plaintive things one after the other, but though boring, much worse by now is Frank Rich, who has finally settled in to a style which is indistinguishable from the TV ads for 'Les Miserables.' He tries for a New York Review tone, but you can always see when he does it. I can't believe I ever took him seriously. But Dowd can catch the immediacy of a moment, and it is not true that her cartoon characters for Democrats have any serious bleeding-heart-liberal-insulting significance. This argument doesn't even take into account that she always referred to Cheney as 'Doctor Death'. Yes, it's very American, and sometimes it's very sharp, the problem being more when she repeats the same devices too often, as 'he promised to save us from endless war and economic meltdown by offering us policy for war and economic meltdown', she does that one too often.

[Ipothia]

I'm not convinced that the term "elitist" sticks because the undercurrent that animates it is the pejorative "uppity." In fact, it seems that being an "elitist" works most of the time in favor of Obama in ways it didn't for Kerry. But the reasons are disappointing if not all out depressing. If he's an elitist, he can't possibly be the black man that scares white people. In other words, on my view, that he is figured as an elitist makes him more palatable to the majority.