Word: racially
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...other words, he hears America singing - and griping, fretting, seething, conniving, hoping, despairing. He can deliver a pitch-perfect expression of the racial anger of many American blacks - as he did in his much discussed speech on race relations earlier this year - and, just as smoothly, unpack the racial irritations gnawing at many whites. To what extent does he share any of those emotions? The doctor never exactly says...
Obama tells a parallel story in his memoir, the journey of a man raised by his Caucasian mother and grandparents who seeks his identity as an African American. Along the path, he was drawn to a number of older black men who argued that America's racial divide is absolute and unbridgeable. Obama recalls a visit as a teenager to the home of a black man his white grandfather considered a friend. To his surprise, the man explained that it was hopeless to think any white man could truly befriend someone black. "He can't know me," the man said...
That is resolutely not the message communicated in Obama's campaign, however. "I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation or victimhood generally," he has declared. He enjoys nearly unanimous support from African Americans in polls; nevertheless, just as Broyard sought to avoid being labeled a "Negro writer," Obama resists efforts to define him as a "black candidate." And for some of the same reasons too. As soon as the race label is added, some of the audience tunes out, others are turned off and still others leap to conclusions about...
...cosmopolitan America and Christian America will never see eye to eye? Just look at me! It's not unusual to meet Obama supporters who say the simple fact of electing him would move mountains, changing the way the world looks at America, turning the page on the nation's racial history and so on. He is the change they seek...
...Meanwhile, if Hillary Clinton's feelings are still bruised, her husband's are positively raw. The former President is particularly resentful of suggestions-which he believes were fueled by the Obama camp-that he attempted to play upon racial fears during the primaries. Not helping is the fact that Obama has yet to follow up on the tentative dinner plans he and Bill Clinton made at the end of the primary season. "It's personal with him, in terms of his own legacy," says a friend of Bill Clinton's. "And the race stuff really left a bad taste...