By Clarence Page
Black is back. So is white. Less than two years after President Barack Obama’s White House win, race is making a political comeback — if it ever really left.
A mere four years ago, for example, Americans celebrated the rise of two post-racial stars: District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty and Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker. Each was touted as a young, energetic, post-civil-rights-era savior in the mold of then-Sen. Obama.
Multiracial coalitions of voters elected them both. Each managed to transcend race-based politics and make gains worthy of national praise regarding schools, crime, housing, economic development and other areas that are nonracial or should be.
Yet, despite their successes, Fenty was voted out of office Sept. 14. White voters still supported him almost 2-to-1, but African-American voters in the majority-black city turned on him by a similarly wide margin.
Booker, at least, managed to be re-elected in May with 59 percent of the vote, although it was a sizable drop from his 72 percent landslide in 2006. As with Fenty, most of Booker’s losses came from black voters.
The problem for both mayors is an old dilemma faced by ethnic crossover candidates: How do you sail in the predominantly white mainstream without being scuttled by your ethnic or racial base?
That’s a constant concern in Chicago, where Mayor Richard M. Daley’s announcement that he was not going to run for re-election ignited the long-suppressed ambitions of at least a dozen potentially serious candidates. It has also touched off worries of a return to the racially tinged “Council Wars” that preceded Daley’s election in 1989.
As a close observer of his leadership (and half of his father’s before him) I can tell you that Daley did right what Fenty did wrong. Wisely following the path of the late Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, Daley reached out to all major groups in his city’s ethnic quilt, including black voters who were his biggest opponents.
Starting from nearly zero, Daley increased his voter turnout among blacks and other groups in subsequent elections. He built the kind of majorities that frightened off potential contenders. Even today, with Chicago financially underwater and his approval ratings in the cellar, no other major contender was ready to run until Daley said he wouldn’t.
Fenty, by contrast, was voted out despite a recent Washington Post poll in which most voters said they thought the District was on the right track. Indeed, the city’s murder rate is down, funding for his youth job programs was up and his nationally famous, though controversial, schools chief Michelle Rhee was clearing out low-performing teachers, principals, school buildings and bureaucracy in ways that made other big-city superintendents jealous.
Unfortunately, Fenty had a deficit of people skills. He turned out to be great at governing, but lousy at politicking. Even bad schools and bad teachers have their constituencies. Fenty’s and Rhee’s hard-charging style offered no spoonfuls of sugar to help their harsh medicine go down.
There are lessons in these examples for President Obama. Although his black support remains strong, it is partly because his supporters are circling wagons against cheap-shot attacks tinged with race, even if explicit words aren’t used.
A recent Forbes article by conservative Dinesh D’Souza — and amazingly endorsed by Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich — offers the bizarre notion that Obama somehow is channeling Kenyan revolutionary beliefs from his dead father, whom he hardly knew.
Until now, Gingrich and D’Souza at least were known for well-researched, thoughtful ideas, whether you agreed with them or not. I even had the pleasure of debating D’Souza on a couple of radio programs after he wrote a well-researched best-seller in the 1990s called “The End of Racism.”
Now he seems determined to prove that book’s title is quite premature, much like the idea of a post-racial America.
