Liberals have reacted with surprise to the recent Pew survey showing that a large and increasing number of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim — shocked to think that Americans could be so misinformed about the president’s religion. The issue here though is not about information, but about politics. Presidential politics always play out on cultural terrain, because the public reflexively makes the presidency a symbol of national identity. Particularly in moments of political or cultural upheaval, people tend to project both desires and fears onto a president’s persona. To supporters of Andrew Jackson in the 1820s and ’30s, for example, “Old Hickory” had the personal qualities they associated with white democracy: honesty, manliness, and frontier toughness, among others. Jackson’s detractors, meanwhile, viewed his personal attributes through the lens of their anxieties about democratization. His Whig opponents continually circulated stories that portrayed him as vulgar, sexually immoral, impulsive, and violent. Similarly, during the Great Depression, FDR’s polio and resulting disability became a metaphor for the nation’s identity. To his supporters Roosevelt’s vulnerability and suffering was linked to the nation’s, as was his optimism about overcoming it. His opponents, meanwhile, carried on a continual whispering campaign claiming that his disease had rendered him mentally reckless, as evidenced by the broad transformation of national governance and economic reform he undertook.
Obama’s racial identity and international background are key elements of his political identity to both supporters and opponents. The “skinny kid with the funny name” who spoke at the 2004 Democratic Convention underscored his difference to reaffirm American exceptionalist rhetoric about equality of opportunity. In “A More Perfect Union,” the famous race speech he gave during the 2008 campaign, Obama linked his own body to the body politic, claiming that in his own genetic makeup he had resolved the differences between blacks and whites that had so long divided the nation. And his opponents - from Hillary Clinton campaign strategists in 2008 to Birthers, Tea Partiers, or conservative commentators today — have sought to portray him not just as politically wrong-headed but as fundamentally un-American because of his race, religion, or supposed national origin. It should thus come as no surprise that the Pew study shows that the belief that Obama is a Muslim is correlated with Republican party affiliation at 34% (according to a new Time Magazine poll it is as high as 46%).
Obama has generally tried to distance himself from the American Islamic community. During the 2008 election, he spoke in hundreds of churches and synagogues, but no mosques. (”We have a very tightly wrapped message,” a campaign aide told Muslim House member Keith Ellison at the time). And he has thus far failed to voice support for the proposed Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan. But Obama cannot escape the issue of Islam. It will become increasingly tied to his persona as it emerges as a national political cleavage. Liberals miss the point by repeatedly proclaiming that Obama is actually Christian. That strategy simply reinforces the demonization of Islam in a game that only conservatives can win. The politically wise course for Obama is - as he did in his race speech - embrace what he has come to represent and reinterpret it through recourse to American rhetoric of pluralism and religious freedom. Just as he claimed to resolve the nation’s racial tensions in his own body, so can he claim to navigate religious and cultural difference by virtue of his own heritage and experience.
No tags for this post.
On Huffington Post, Aug 1, 2009
The growing visibility of the birther movement underscores both the enduring power of race in American politics, as well as the enduring cultural symbolism of the American presidency. The birther movement is not merely the province of increasingly vocal paranoics, as some commentators would have it. Rather it is increasingly becoming the ground on which mainstream conservatives seek to shape the political landscape over questions of race, immigration, health care, and foreign policy, among others. Key to this is the historic link between personal biography and presidential power.
Beyond their specific political stands on issues, the personal lives of presidents are always key to their claim to represent “the American people.” Andrew Jackson is largely responsible for this idea of president as personification of the nation. As a former Indian fighter, a Tennessean, and the first president to be elected by white, male, propertyless voters in most of the states, he successfully embodied a politics of both democratic inclusion and violent westward expansion. At subsequent defining moments in American political history presidents have linked biography to political authority in order to transform popular conceptions of national identity and purpose — think of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Reagan, for example. Such presidents change politics by becoming living metaphors of national purpose.
Obama, as a Black presidential candidate with a Kenyan father, an international boyhood, and Muslim and Luo names, faced an extraordinary challenge in turning his personal identity into a representative American one. He successfully did so by offering up a compelling personal narrative that combined immigrant striving, the redemption of Civil Rights Era promises, and the reconciliation of longstanding national differences. Indeed he made his most powerful personal metaphor at the very moment when his credibility was most in jeopardy. In his now famous Philadelphia speech in response to Jeremiah Wright’s comments about the American legacy of race and imperialism, he turned to autobiography to claim both his white (sometimes racist) grandmother and his African father to bolster his legitimacy. “It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional of candidates,” he said. “But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.” Thus the narrative became a quite conventional celebration of American liberal pluralism, and one that is evident in the very strands of his DNA.
Just as Jackson’s claim to represent the common (white) man underwrote the expansion of his political power, so too could Obama’s autobiographical claims authorize the exercise of political imperatives domestically and internationally. However, the reverse is also true. Just as Obama’s autobiographical claims can authorize the exercise of political imperatives domestically and internationally, attacks on his personal identity can also be tools to constrain his agenda, as we are already beginning to see.
Such open attacks are tricky in an increasingly multicultural nation. Birthright, though, can an effective articulation of resistance to Obama precisely because it joins an unspoken racial claim about national belonging to the odd and historically specific (anti-Jacobin) Constitutional requirement of natural born citizenship for the office. Since presidential authority is always tied to biography and identity, what more effective way is there to make this president vulnerable than to challenge the very basis of his claim to American citizenship?
Racial claims about Obama’s American authenticity cannot stand on their own because they too obviously violate the self-understanding of most Americans as egalitarian and colorblind. On the other hand, a Constitutional challenge to legitimacy couldn’t get anywhere without underlying racial appeals. Imagine an American candidate of Irish, Italian, or Australian parentage being challenged on birthright grounds.
The birther movement should not — and at this point really cannot — be dismissed. But the movement does not matter merely because it reveals potent strains of racial fear in American culture. Nor is it likely that the movement will gain the backing of a broad segment of Americans. This movement matters because it prepares the ground for other political assaults from the right. We already see how GOP figures who do not directly back birther claims nevertheless use them to de-legitimize Obama and advance conservative agendas. Liz Cheney, as we have seen, is using it as a jumping off point to criticize Obama for insufficient militarism. It provides subtext for arguments that current health care reform proposals are the essentially Un-American. No doubt Lou Dobbs will directly use birther discourse to bludgeon Obama on immigration reform when the time comes.
The wellsprings of racism and xenophobia run too deep in American political culture for Obama’s narrative to have become fully embraced without significant opposition. But the fact that he triumphed with his version of national identity in the 2008 election against the increasingly racist and violent framing of his opponents is testament to the potential for a realignment in American politics. Doing so, however, will require bold and consistent reframing of racial politics by the Obama administration.
Tags:
birthers,
obama,
orly taitz
McCain’s speech demonstrated the ways in which the GOP is finally losing its ideological coherence. At the end of the long Reagan era, the party cannot either sustain its conservative base nor abandon it for a broader coalition. McCain’s desire to split the difference shows that Democrats have an historic chance to press a progressive agenda.
On another note, Sarah Palin - a kind of George Wallace in drag - brings to mind a great essay by the psychoanalytic theorist Joan Riviere, Womanliness as Masquerade.
Tags:
GOP,
John McCain,
Republican Convention,
Sarah Palin
