Being President Barack Hussein Obama Black Politics After the Civil Rights Revolution The Holden Lecture Jackson State University Jackson, Mississippi November 4, 2010 Dianne M. Pinderhughes Notre Dame Presidential Faculty Fellow Professor of Africana Studies Professor of Political Science The University of Notre Dame Introduction Thank you so much for the invitation to visit Jackson State University to deliver the Holden Lecture, named in honor of my long time friend and colleague, Matthew Holden. It was a pleasure to have been invited by Mary Coleman, formerly Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, now Dean of Lesley College at Lesley University in Boston, Massachusetts. Thank you Dr. Alisa Mosley, Director of the Jackson State University Center for University Scholars, and especially Mrs. Louise Vaughn for providing me with guidance and helping to arrange my travel. I’m delighted to be able to visit Jackson State University again. My previous visits were related to NCOBPS meetings, and my own research. This is also the home of a number of old – long term colleagues and friends: Leslie McLemore, President of the University; Curtina Moreland-Young, Chair of Public Policy and Administration; Ally Mack, Dean of the Division of International Studies, and D’Andra Orey, Chair of Political Science; and Michelle Deardorff, Head of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. Jackson, Mississippi is also course the location of the important work of that marvelous couple, Myrlie and Medgar Evers. I’ve been using Myrlie Evers’ work For Us The Living in my course in the past, and also this semester in my Freshman Seminar on “Black Politics After the Civil Rights Revolution” to help my students understand what life was like for African Americans Before the Civil Rights Revolution. I decided to address frame my talk around the subject entitled Being President Barack Hussein Obama Pinderhughes+–+The+Holden+Lecture+2010Page%2% Black Politics After the Civil Rights Revolution I chose to use this address to allow me to draw on several components of my ongoing research: first the Presidency as an institution, second Barack Obama, the current President, but an intriguing and fascinating political personality and intellectual, and finally my work on Black Politics after the Civil Rights Revolution. I’ve been writing on the first and third of these topics for decades, literally since I began my career as a Political Scientist. I’m working on a collection of that work and this has helped me revisit some of that earlier writing and apply it to my reflections on the Obama Presidency. Obama is more recent for the reasons we all understand, his dizzyingly rapid ascent from community activist, to law student, to attorney and University of Chicago adjunct law professor, to Illinois State Senator, Senator and President. His role as President allows, requires me to talk about these other dimensions as well. Now, I made a general decision to talk about the Obama Presidency in the early summer although I didn’t nail down my title until early this fall. What I didn’t focus on at that point was the conjunction of this address with the Midterm Elections this Tuesday, which forces me, whether I like it or not, to acknowledge the contextual element of the challenges to the Obama Presidency in the talk before knowing the electoral outcome. And although I didn’t finish this address on the deadline required, I also could not wait until the elections to incorporate the results as we’ll all still be absorbing and evaluating the outcomes for some time to come. So let me turn to how I’ve organized my talk. First, I begin with a brief recognition of the development and outpouring of literature on President Obama, and the Obama Presidency from all directions. Then I shift to evaluations of the Obama Presidency including those of social policy scholars, the views of black scholars on Obama’s campaign, and Presidency, debates on the responsiveness of his administration to the Black Agenda. I include my own efforts to understand how his administration approached these issues during its first year in work. Third, I offer comments on Barack Obama, the man who is President. He is a person of considerable gravitas, intellectual energy, and charisma, who generates a wide range of reactions among African Americans, whites, Latinos and Asians. Why has he been able to overcome the conventional boundaries to national leadership, but ‘failed’ at stabilizing his Presidency. Pinderhughes+–+The+Holden+Lecture+2010Page%3% Finally I turn to an exploration of Black Politics after the Civil Rights Revolution and try to say a bit about all of this within the context of Tuesday’s election results. This is political context within which Barack Obama was born and came to maturity as a young man and as political leader. We tend to focus on the Civil Rights era as a decisive one for African American politics, although I have no doubt that I will receive more than a few challenging questions about this during question and answer. I conclude my lecture by asking about the issues of Black Politics that came to the political agenda for African Americans during the era After the Civil Rights Revolution. How were they framed, and how or were they resolved? Are these issues that America can absorb? The Obama Literature. i There has been a tremendous outpouring of literature on Barack Obama, as person, as President, as leader of a new administration. I do not claim that my relatively short list is comprehensive, but it suggests the range of work that has been published and is on the way. Outpouring of research on the Obama Presidency i. Andra Gillespie, Editor. Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership. New York: Routledge, 2010. ii. Dewey Clayton. The Presidential Campaign of Barack Obama: A Critical Analysis of a Racially Transcendant Strategy. Routledge, 2010. iii. Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, Kathleen Hall Jamieson. The Obama Victory How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. iv. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Editors. Who Should Be First? Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. v. James T. Kloppenberg. Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes and the American Liberal Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. vi. Reaching for a New Deal: President Obama's Agenda and the Dynamics of U.S. Politics. The Russell Sage Foundation, Working papers and Forthcoming book (2011) http://www.russellsage.org/research/working- group-obamas-policy-agenda Pinderhughes+–+The+Holden+Lecture+2010Page%4% vii. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol. Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. viii. Bob Woodward. Obama’s Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. ix. Jonathan Alter, The Promise President Obama: Year One. Simon & Schuster, 2010. x. Peniel Joseph. Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. Basic Civitas Books, 2010. xi. Larry Sabato. The Year of Obama: How Obama Won the White House. Longman, 2009. xii. Ted McClelland. Young Mr. Obama: Black Chicago and the Making of a Black President. Bloomsbury Press, 2010. xiii. Gwen Ifill. The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Anchor Press, 2009. xiv. Jabari Asim. What Obama Means..For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future. New York: William Morrow, 2009. The breadth, complexity and depth of this work is certainly worth noting. It suggests to me, both that literature which is straightforward, clearly positive, clearly negative, academic, policy oriented, popular of varied sorts suggests a new era, a new phenomenon, that people of all sorts want to understand. I’ve only listed the academic, political activist and policy analysis books. I’ve set aside President Obama’s three books published on his way to the US Senate and White House, (he has a children’s book due out in 10 days Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters – perfect for Christmas) not included the Obama speeches, Obama in the White House published by all the major media outlets: Time, Life, Essence, the New York Times. I’ve not tried to include the coloring books, paper doll books, or the critics that seem somewhat extreme. But the list goes on and on, and more are on the way, including by Political Scientists who’ve not typically rushed to get work in print on black politicians or work with implications for Black politics. Pinderhughes+–+The+Holden+Lecture+2010Page%5% Evaluations of Obama’s Presidency I turn next to an evaluation of Obama’s Presidency, and summarize a variety of perspectives. I draw on the forthcoming work of scholars of social policy literature, who have a strong interest in the history and evolution of American social policy. Evaluations of Obama’s Presidency on Social Policy xv. Skocpol and Jacob Reaching for a New Deal 1. Outline of issues FORTHCOMING Reflections on the American Presidency: The End of Reagan and 20 Years Before Obama I turn to my own views of the Presidency, written for the National Urban League’s 1988 State of Black America, at the end of the Reagan era, and twenty years before Barack Obama was actually elected. In that piece, “Civil Rights and the Future of the American Presidency I argued that changes in the electorate made it advantageous for President to cultivate a black constituency. I return to that argument. I think therefore that it is time to move the focus of analysis to another level by evaluating the benefits and costs of presidents as independent actors altering their behavior relative to civil rights policy formulation.ii If presidential candidates or sitting presidents assume there are severe penalties for taking strong reform positions on civil rights, then it is altruistic rather than politically advantageous for them to do so.