Obama’s achievement is truly a milestone in American history, and should be celebrated as such. He is an impressive man in many ways.
But he will not be elected President.
The reason is not race, as Noemie Emery argues in the June 23 issue of the Weekly Standard . (Emery, by the way, doesn’t directly predict Obama’s defeat in November.) She argues that the real problem with Obama has to do with his political culture.
Emery makes a couple of overlapping distinctions: between “priests” and “warriors” in the Democratic party, between Academdicians and (Scoop) “Jacksonians.” There are deep divisions between these “classes”: “Acamedicians traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise. Jacksonians prefer men of action, whose achievements are tangible. Acamedicians love nuance; Jacksonians clarity; acamedicians love fairness, Jacksonians justice; acamedicians dislike force and think it is vulgar; Jacksonians admire it, when justly applied.”
Obama is an Acamedician and a priest. He is Adlai Stephenson rather than Scoop Jackson. And he is facing a Jacksonian warrior to top all warriors.
America is a Jacksonian/warrior nation. Emery points out that Americans, even in the supposedly racist South, are perfectly willing to vote for a black candidate, provided he shows the grit, fighting spirit, and strength they admire.
Emery concludes, “Obama’s problem may be less that he is running while black than that he is running to be the first Academician elected as president, a category that is zero for eight in national contests thus far. He is peering into an abyss not of bias, but a large Jackson Hole of rejection by warrior voters. And this problem is more than skin deep.”
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