I wouldn't be surprised if The Barackstar! wanted to shove one of
hillary's size 14 pant suits down
the good rev. wright's throat right now.
Barack Obama's desperate desire to belong
Barack Obama began his campaign for the presidency as a candidate who just happened to be black. Now he is a black man running for president.
He started by insisting that America should take him for what he was as an individual - a talented, eloquent politician who would embody "the change" that the nation needed.
In the early months, when he was winning primaries in states with almost entirely white populations, he never used the "r" word. This was the man who was going to transcend racial politics once and for all.
The fact that he could not is his - and America's - tragedy. His speech last week, which by now has given rise to as much detailed exegesis as any text in modern political history, was an admission of defeat.
It was an ingenious, masterfully drafted attempt to square a circle that he had hoped never to address. But for all of its nuance and its rhetorical force, it was a surrender.
Mr Obama has accepted the mantle of black resentment: the bitterness of slavery and segregation, the triumphs of the civil rights movement, the continuing struggle for equal opportunity and achievement. They are all his now, an intrinsic part of the package in which he offers himself to the electorate, even though, ironically, they have little to do with his own life experience.
He is not descended from slaves, nor was his childhood marked by poverty, segregated schooling or social deprivation. His father was not African-American but entirely African and his mother, as we all know, was white. He did not grow up in the midst of the ugly hatreds and divisions of the American South, or even with the more subtle, disguised discrimination of the North.
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So how has he come to find himself trapped in this political ghetto? More mystifyingly, why did he choose to cleave to a spiritual mentor whose church was dedicated to the perpetuation of black anger? Why did he identify himself, in what must have been a quite conscious act of personal reinvention, with a pastor and congregation whose collective memory was so utterly different from his own?
It is too facile and unfair to claim, as some commentators have done, that he joined the church of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright because he needed a political base in the Chicago black community in order to prosper in Illinois politics.
I think that if his motives had been as crassly opportunistic as that he would have been more alert to the dangers that Mr Wright's sermons represented to him. Surely he would have seen that when a pastor starts urging his followers from the pulpit to sing "God damn America" instead of "God bless America", the only place for an aspiring politician is out the door.
So what was it all about? It was part of a phenomenon that almost no one who was not born and raised in the United States seems to grasp: the desperate need that Americans feel to be part of a shared ethnic or cultural identity that will give them a sense of rootedness and belonging in the vast, endlessly shifting flux of a country that is a nation but not a people.
I would guess that Mr Obama, who had a personal genealogy even more dislocated and idiosyncratic than most, wanted to belong. He wanted a community that could enfold him and make him feel that he was part of something that was recognisable and self-affirming.
Anyone who truly wants to understand American identity politics - and why politicians find it almost impossible to escape it - should pay a visit to the Ellis Island Museum.
The great echoing reception centre, where wave after wave of immigrants, having sailed past the Statue of Liberty, were accepted into a country that they had never seen, has become an astonishingly moving monument to one of the greatest social experiments in human history.
When I went there a few years ago, I was struck by the school parties. The children - who were almost certainly at least second- and probably third- or fourth-generation Americans - were chatting to each other about their own families' histories. They all seemed to know not only their country and region of origin, but often the name of the village from which their ancestors had come.
It occurred to me then that I had always been aware that my grandparents had been born in the Jewish ghetto in Kiev, whereas my British husband (from whom I get my Irish married name) knew little about the specific origins of his family in the "old country".
The British find the sentimentality of Americans toward their national roots largely absurd and occasionally sinister - like when, for example, legions of fourth-generation Irish-Americans feel morally bound to supply the IRA with money for guns.
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