Boston Globe's Jackson: "Obama makes a clean hit"

Obama makes a clean hit
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist February 14, 2007

DURHAM N.H. MR. CLEAN mopped up. He articulated what 3,000 people wanted to hear. Barack Obama left the gymnasium Monday night at the University of New Hampshire beaming as brightly as he came in.
In the dim corners of the nascent 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden must be kicking himself even more than before.

It was as if Obama reveled in precisely the words that fellow candidate Biden harpooned himself with two weeks ago. Biden said Obama is "articulate and bright and clean." Those comments sparked a debate about unconscious stereotypes about white people still being shocked in the year 2007 that educated black people can speak, take baths, or aren't running off with your purse.

I wondered if Biden tripped over a much deeper meaning. The potential meaning hit me last week when I served on a panel at Harvard Law School, screening an upcoming PBS documentary on racism and the death penalty, "Race to Execution." One of the most poignant moments was when Illinois defense attorney Andrea Lyon talked about how prosecutors try to keep off the jury any black people who have any "memory of the civil rights movement."

I wondered out loud if the sanitizing of juries unconsciously percolates in the current adulation for Obama. It is well documented that white Americans collectively hold a more sanitized view of racial progress than do African-Americans and Latinos. Part of the result is that old-line civil rights organizations are easy to marginalize. President Bush flirted with being the first president not to address the NAACP convention in over 80 years until he spoke before it last year.

Obama did plenty of civil rights grunt work when few people knew his name, trying in the 1980s to help public housing residents in Chicago rid their buildings of asbestos. He also arrived to national prominence without an official moniker or acronym of civil rights hanging from around his neck.

"He's safer," Chanda Corbett, 36, the vice chair of UNH's presidential office on people of color and a psychologist in the school's counseling service, said of Obama. "There's something about the way he carries himself that says, 'I'm not here to accuse you, trying to force people to say, I'm wrong or I'm a racist.' "

Sean McGhee, 47, the director of UNH's office of multicultural affairs, said, "I think what people are tuning in to is that he did civil rights and human rights the way most so-called civil rights workers actually do it, in small ways: social workers, community activists, teachers who go the extra mile by buying books for their students."

Purnell "Fred" Ross, the 68-year-old president of the New Hampshire Seacoast branch of the NAACP, said, "The fact that he does not have that history I think works to his advantage. As long as he seeks counsel from people who have that history, he will be fine."

Obama played his history perfectly to this vastly white crowd. He could do so because so many Americans are currently in similar boats, watching domestic hopes go down the drain because of Iraq. Obama, who has called for a troop pullout a year from now, proudly told the crowd that he has been a civil rights lawyer and a constitutional lawyer. He said he thought that would be helpful since, in his words, the Bush administration has spent the last six years gutting the constitution.

He received wide applause and few hard questions, unlike Hillary Clinton, who was pressed Saturday in New Hampshire on her vote to allow the invasion in Iraq.

"I haven't seen this much charisma since JFK," said Suzanne Johnson, 47, a high school history teacher from Epping. "I have high school students who know who he is and that's saying a lot."

Two school bus drivers, Amy Tank, 53, of Epping, and Sue Hills, 39, of Exeter, both said that when they mentioned to the students they were going to hear Obama, cries of "He rocks!" and "Get him to sign a picture!" rang out.

Douglas Prince, 64, a UNH media services manager, went to the most recent antiwar protest in Washington. He said he was looking at Obama because Clinton and other Democrats display "too much triangulation, too much manipulation and calculation. I want candidates who say what they believe without parsing and spinning."

Obama had one uncomfortable moment of parsing and spinning, through a tortured explanation of supporting civil unions but not gay marriage. Other than that, Mr. Clean left with no stains on his suit. Of course it is early. The dirt has yet to fly.