Barack Obama’s success, as Congressman John Lewis put it recently, is another step on the long road toward laying down the “burden of race.” But the growing use of the phrase “post-racial America” should worry us all.

Consider the results of one major social science study, published in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, which yielded some troubling results about segregation of neighborhoods in America. Researchers at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the University of Michigan surveyed a large representative sample of households in Chicago and Detroit. As part of this highly innovative study, every participant was handed a laptop and was asked to view a series of video clips showing different neighborhoods. The set of neighborhoods remained constant. But the video was altered to manipulate their make up, to show either whites populating the neighborhood, or blacks or a mixed-race population.

According to UIC Professor of Sociology Maria Krysan, what the study sought to determine was “whether whites are colorblind in their evaluations of neighborhoods or whether racial composition still matters—even when holding constant the quality of the neighborhood.” The results clearly show that whites rated the neighborhood much more favorably when whites dominated the make-up. And the more negative the stereotypes a white individual held of African Americans generally, the more likely they were to negatively rate the identical neighborhood with a visible black presence.

This research combines new, high-quality data with grounded, real world problems and real world research techniques. While we would all like to believe that cues on social class now drive Americans more than those on race, it simply isn’t true. As sociologist Krysan explained: “These findings demonstrate that ‘objective’ characteristics such as housing [quality] are not sufficient for whites to overcome the stereotypes they have about communities with African-American residents.” Sadly, it was the race cues that mattered, not the class cues.
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The study found much more ambiguous or “mixed” results for blacks. Blacks did judge schools to be of higher quality in mixed-race and all-white neighborhoods. But blacks were not so ready to judge black neighborhoods as negatively affecting the value of homes or the safety of a community. The results for blacks were thus not as strongly correlated to stereotypes as for whites. An earlier generation of research done in the mid-1990s did show that negative racial stereotypes held by blacks about whites (as well as toward Hispanics and Asians) play a part in judgments about desirable neighborhoods.

This study, many others before it and, no doubt, more to come in the future, signal the depth of both a structural and cultural problem of race in America. It is easy in the moment of joy surrounding a great triumph to overstate the amount of change that has occurred and the future pace at which change will continue.

Few scholars remark on it now, but it is worth noting that on May 17, 1954 Thurgood Marshall stood triumphant on the U.S. Supreme Court steps, after a unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision. He boldly predicted to the assembled reporters that within five years, there would be no segregated schools in America. Well, as we all learned over the ensuing decades, one great victory in the battle against racial injustice does not bring the struggle to a definitive conclusion.

Barack Obama’s election is an unparalleled achievement that we will all be celebrating for some time to come. His election shows, unequivocally, that we have done much to narrow the racial divide in America. At the same time, we must acknowledge that we have not dismantled a society still segregated by race in most of its neighborhoods and schools. And we have not erased the great economic disparities separating average black and white Americans. Seeds of mistrust and miscommunication along the color line are deeply sown and will continue to sprout ugly weeds.

The post-racial narrative is premature. One of the great challenges of the Obama era will be how to celebrate its promise, without taking our eyes off the prize.

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Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign boosted—no, it actually created—the careers of a whole cadre of black political reporters.

Barack Obama’s historic capture of Oval Office? Well, not so much.

The reasons behind the white-out of the Obama campaign are varied and complex, ranging from the reduction of general political coverage by mainstream media to fewer experienced black political reporters to the persistence of racism in the doling out of coveted newsroom assignments.

A generation ago, as the peripatetic preacher crisscrossed the country to the chants of “Run, Jesse, Run!” black journalists—among them Gwen Ifill of The (Baltimore) Evening Sun, Julie Johnson of The (Baltimore) Sun and later The New York Times and ABC News, George Curry of the Chicago Tribune, Ron Smothers of The New York Times, Milton Coleman of The Washington Post, Kevin Merida of The Dallas Morning News and Kenneth Walker of ABC News—traveled along, reporting and interpreting the historic political campaign.

Nearly a quarter century later, Barack Obama made the same primary run, and it was not the symbolic stab at the White House that Jackson’s represented; instead, the junior senator from Illinois took the prize and will become the nation’s first black president.

But black journalists by and large weren’t around to document the groundbreaking victory. A handful of black journalists popped in and out of the Obama campaign, notably Suzanne Malveaux of CNN, Ron Allen of NBC and William Douglas of McClatchy Newspapers. At the end of the campaign, the black faces most visible on the Obama plane belonged to reporters and photographers representing Ebony and Essence, magazines that don’t traditionally cover politics.

The complexion of the media can be an important factor in defining the president and his policies. In fact, even as Obama’s campaign operated with “no-drama” precision, some media miscues emerged, among them the Associated Press describing Obama as half-black.

Speaking at a recent journalism symposium conducted by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, Jack White, who covered the 1984 Jackson campaign for Time magazine, noted the irony of Obama’s taking office with relatively few black reporters assigned to cover his administration.

“We are going to integrate the Oval Office long before we integrate the media that covers the president,” White said. “The job of interpreting this president to the world is too big and too important to be left just to white reporters and editors.”

Political reporting is something of a boutique corner in most newsrooms, a space reserved for those deemed to be the best and the brightest. Political reporting was glamorized by Timothy Crouse’s 1973 ” The Boys on the Bus ,” a best-seller that revealed the techniques and antics of the reporters covering the 1972 presidential campaign. Of course, all the boys on that bus—the biggest names in the business—were all white.

The color of campaign coverage changed somewhat when Jackson announced his presidential aspirations. Run more like a civil rights crusade than a modern, efficient presidential campaign, the Jackson entourage was populated, at first, by black reporters who had largely cut their teeth covering Urban League dinners and NAACP conventions.

Kevin Merida, now an associate editor of The Washington Post, recalled being reluctant to cover Jackson’s fledgling campaign, fearing it would derail him from more coveted assignments as an investigative reporter. Now, he credits covering Jackson with boosting his career, which includes his recent publication of a photo-essay book on the Obama campaign.

“I guess I was like a lot of other black reporters who didn’t want to cover Jackson,” he said in a recent interview. “We didn’t want to get pigeonholed, and we didn’t anticipate the story becoming as big as it did.”

The lure of political reporting stayed with Merida, unlike most of the other blacks reporters covering Jackson. Often, between presidential campaigns, he marveled at the dearth of black faces at political meetings and gatherings where white political writers cemented relationships with campaign operatives and grass-roots activists.

“Covering politics isn’t always a glamorous job,” he said. “It’s a lot of rubber-chicken dinners and talking to a lot of county political hacks.”

Squeezed by tighter budgets, fewer newspapers are springing for reporters—white or black—to indulge in such reporting. The number of black reporters who do cover full-bore politics has reverted to its pre-Jesse Jackson days.

White, now retired from Time and a regular contributor to The Root , recalled covering Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential runs, saying it was starkly different from the coverage he observed from the sidelines during the Obama campaign.

“I got the impression that black reporters didn’t get as much of a bounce from [Obama's] campaign as you might expect,” White said. “Maybe that’s because Jackson was seen back then as the black people’s candidate, who shocked the world by winning a couple primaries. Obama was seen as something more than a black candidate and that meant white editors wanted to put their best political team on him. And, of course, in their minds that meant white reporters.”

Michael Calderone, a media writer for Politico.com, wrote recently that an Obama White House is likely to bring more black and minority reporters to Washington beats. He quoted Julie Mason, White House correspondent for The Examiner in Washington, as saying: “The number of African-American commentators on TV has gone through the roof and I think that’d be reflected in how [news organizations] cover the White House.”

But others are more skeptical. Richard Prince, author of the online Journal-isms, reported recently that black political writers were “big-footed” off the Obama campaign plane by white reporters. He said in an interview that he sees no evidence of that changing after Obama takes office.

“Most news organizations are ignoring that [Obama] is black, just as they did for the most part during the campaign,” Prince said. “Having black reporters on the White House beat is just not a priority, unless it can be measurably demonstrated that some special access or advantage can be gained by having a black reporter there.”

What if Obama insisted on black reporters being among the press corps?

“That’s not likely,” Prince said. “He’s not going to be that kind of president. Jesse might have been, but not Obama.”

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<p>Barack Obama doesn’t need Valerie Jarrett in the Senate. But if that’s what she has her eye on, chances are his old seat is all hers.</p>
11/11/2008

The news that Barack Obama’s confidant and transition team co-chair, Valerie Jarrett, may be the president-elect’s choice to replace him in the Senate tells you two things for certain:

1) How attractive a seat in the U. S. Senate is for anyone interested in political office.

2) How indebted Obama is to Jarrett for his success.

Obama has made a point of articulating his understanding that the choice of who replaces him is not his; it belongs to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich—”This is the governor’s decision. It is not my decision.”—but who can doubt that the man elected to the seat (and, oh yeah, the most popular politician on the planet) would not have a say in who succeeds him?

The mere discussion of Jarrett as a possible successor has fueled talk that Mr. Change has quickly succumbed to Washington cronyism and old-style Chicago politics. That is grossly unfair, mostly to Jarrett, who is extraordinarily well-qualified for Obama’s Senate seat and many other jobs. But Washington doesn’t do fair. So let’s get to the debate.

Just to get the qualifications issue out of the way: Jarrett graduated from Stanford and University of Michigan Law School. She was deputy corporation counsel for finance and development in the city administration of Harold Washington and deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard M. Daley. For three years, she headed the city’s Department of Planning and Development and later was chairman of the Chicago Transit Authority.

She was chairman of the board of the Chicago Stock Exchange and was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. These days, when she’s not palling around with the soon-to-be most powerful person in the free world, she also heads Chicago’s 2016 Olympic Committee.

Jarrett could have just about any job she wants in Obama’s Washington, and if she wants to be a senator, it’s probably what she’ll get. Obama was the only African American in the Senate and appointing Jarrett would address that concern for the governor. But appointing Jarrett would also be a snub of sorts to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who also has his eye on the seat.

It is probably in Obama’s best political interest to keep Jarrett in the White House. She has been described as the other half of his brain. She’ll be both an authority figure and completely loyal to him and his agenda, exactly the kind of surrogate he’ll want wandering the halls of the West Wing.

But a seat in the U.S. Senate is a prize, a base of power in itself, and that is why the jockeying for it has been so intense.

The known contenders are three members of Congress—Jackson, Reps. Luis Gutiérrez and Jan Schakowsky—along with Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth, who heads the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. Other names in the hopper: State Attorney General Lisa Madigan, whose popularity could threaten Blagojevich’s re-election chances in 2010; and State Comptroller Dan Hynes, who also wants to be governor and who lost in the 2004 senate primary to Obama.

Whoever gets the job will prove to be a loyal foot soldier for the administration, so it’s not like Obama needs to install Jarrett as his eyes and ears in the Senate. Regardless of who fills his seat, he’s got Majority Whip Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois, as his biggest booster. So whatever push there is behind Jarrett, it can’t be about ensuring Obama’s backing in the Senate.

The last time a senator had to vacate his seat to move into the White House, personal considerations beat out political necessity. After John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, his chosen replacement, his brother Ted, had not yet reached the requisite age of 30 to qualify for the job. The Kennedys persuaded the governor of Massachusetts to essentially appoint a caretaker senator, Benjamin A. Smith, the mayor of Gloucester, to serve until the following year when Ted Kennedy was elected, beginning a 45-year career in the Senate.

Jarrett may be a tough choice for Blagojevich. The governor is hugely unpopular, and his 2010 re-election chances are gravely endangered. He may choose to appoint someone who helps him with some particular voting bloc in 2010, when that appointee will be up for election to a full term in the Senate.

Or it might be that Valerie gets what Valerie wants. At a meeting in Washington with black journalists over the weekend, she would not say what that was. That is up to Obama, she said: “I leave it in his hands, his very capable hands. … So we’ll see, we’ll see.”

We will.

Terence Samuel is deputy editor to The Root.

Also on The Root:

Terence Samuel makes the final call and Jack White says an unexpected thank you.

Return to The Root Homepage

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<p>Barack Obama visited the White House yesterday. My uncle, another first, would have been proud.</p>
11/11/2008

Barack Obama went to the White House Monday to begin the transition to his presidency. He arrived, protected by the Secret Service, in a chauffeured limousine, to enter the front gate as the president-elect of the United States of America. Yes, this does confirm that Nov. 4, 2008 really did happen. A black man did garner enough white votes in this country, its long history of racism and discrimination notwithstanding, to win the presidency. He even did better among white voters in general than the last two white Democratic candidates for the presidency. Damn!

I couldn’t help thinking about my uncle, E. Frederic Morrow, who was the first African American to serve on the White House staff in the executive office of President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1955 to 1960. Among other achievements, in 1958 he was instrumental in arranging the historic meeting between Eisenhower and black leaders A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Lester B. Granger and Martin Luther King Jr. on June 23, 1958.

Those were trying times for a black staffer in a White House that was, at best, ambivalent about civil rights. My uncle often found himself caught in the middle, between white officials resistant to his progressive advice and black Americans quick to call him an “Uncle Tom” if they could see no immediate results. But Uncle Fred was no stranger to struggle. In the Urban League and the NAACP, he risked his life to fight for civil rights in the 1930s South and then served as an army officer during World War II.

In those days, the only African Americans expected in the White House were servants; the presence of any other black Americans was a rarity. I was lucky. I not only visited the White House but met Eisenhower in person because Uncle Fred arranged it. Because of that, I still “like Ike”; his Republican successors, however, have gone from bad to worse.
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I can’t count the numerous encounters Uncle Fred had with people who could not believe that he was part of Eisenhower’s entourage and staff. Blacks weren’t even allowed to guard the president back then; all we could do was cook and clean the big house.

And now Barack Obama will be the president. I saw him win the election on Nov. 4, and I saw him enter the White House on Nov. 10, the day before Armistice Day.

Armistice Day makes me—I’m a military historian—think of all those African-American men and women who have served this country so loyally in all its wars, with the hope that their sacrifice might earn their race the equality it has long merited. Uncle Fred’s youngest brother, my Uncle William, was an infantry officer in the North African and Italian campaigns. Each and every time he and other black veterans returned, white Americans thwarted their aspirations to equality, often brutally, at the end of a lynching rope or in a race riot. Now a black man will be the commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. I believe that some white folks who have always lauded their own patriotic loyalty to the president, the commander in chief and denigrated that of minorities, have taken it for granted that the president and commander in chief would be white. Now we’ll all have the chance to see if they’re really American patriots.

I thought of Uncle Fred on Election Night and of his fears later in life that the United States seemed incapable of surmounting white racism. The election of Ronald Reagan was, for him, the last straw, as the Republican Party, in his words “had nothing more to do for the Negro and he [Fred] would have nothing more to do with the GOP.”

The election of Barack Obama stunned and elated me. Uncle Fred and my father, John Sr., an ambassador in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and also a life-long fighter for civil rights, in their most optimistic moments, never imagined the election of an African American to the American presidency; neither did I.

They and my other ancestors may be dead, but our ancestors live on in us, and I felt their presence powerfully on Nov. 4. They were very much alive that night.

I was disappointed, but not surprised, that whites, old and young, in the Deep South, where I live, remain so resistant to change. Much work remains.

But the incoming president is a black man. I saw him win the election. I saw him enter the White House. Damn!

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There is a lot of head shaking over Jesse Jackson Jr.’s murky involvement in the swirl of muck engulfing Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. While Jackson is clearly not a target of the federal investigation that has ensnared Blagojevich, he may the one taking the biggest political hit so far.

Jackson’s chances for the Senate seat, and therefore any higher political office, may have been irreparably damaged by the Blago scandal. The governor, after all, has been under investigations for years; his public approval ratings were in the low teens, which means not even his distant cousins were sticking by him. He had no good name left to preserve and no political future to worry about. If he manages to stay out of jail, it will be a legal and personal triumph.

But Jesse Jackson Jr., who had managed to ably establish himself as a legitimate and respected political force in Chicago and in national politics, separate from his famous father, suddenly finds himself explaining away problems not of his own making. Except for the fact that he so badly wanted to be a U.S. senator.

Who knows what U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has on tape or whether what he has on tape amounts to enough to convict Hot Rod Blagojevich? What we know for sure is that Blago’s done; that Barack Obama and his posse seem confidently clear of the mess so far. The only person explaining, really, is Jesse Jr.

“I did not initiate or authorize anyone at any time to promise anything to Governor Blagojevich on my behalf. I never sent a message or an emissary to the governor to make an offer, to plead my case or to propose a deal about a U.S. Senate seat, period,” Jackson said this week after a hastily called press conference on Capitol Hill. “I thought, mistakenly, that the process was fair, aboveboard and on the merits. I thought, mistakenly, that the governor was evaluating me and other Senate hopefuls based upon our credentials and qualifications.”

The emotion was real and raw. But the overall tone, despite the defiance, was one of defeat.

It is a standard rule of political combat that if you’re the one explaining, you’re the one losing, and the thing that may hurt Jackson most was the sense that he may have wanted it too much.

After the news that Blagojevich had been heard on tape suggesting that Jackson was willing to raise money in exchange for Obama’s old seat, the instant reaction was that whatever Jackson’s chances were—and they were judged to be significant—of replacing Obama in the Senate, had now evaporated. Jackson’s political profile was one of a serious legislator who had outgrown his father’s shadow. Obama’s departure leaves the Senate, once again, an institution of all white members. In addition to his qualifications, a Jackson appointment has a lot to offer in terms of maintaining the most minimal degree of diversity in the Senate.

And Jackson had been open in his eagerness for the job, and that eagerness may color how people view the suggestion that he was willing to play ball with Blagojevich, despite the dearth of evidence to support it. “I want to make this fact plain, I reject and denounce pay-to-play politics and have no involvement whatsoever in any wrongdoing,” Jackson assured reporters on Wednesday.

And even as Jackson was distancing himself from Blagojevich and the tainted process this week, his attorney, James Montgomery Sr., was making clear that the congressman still had his eyes on the job.

“He’s campaigned for it,” he said. “He wants it. He’s entitled to it. He’s qualified for it. Yes, he would accept it.”

Now however, it looks like the next senator will be chosen by special election, which means the voting universe is a lot bigger and exponentially more complicated.

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This week Barack Obama will choose his environmental team, the group of people responsible for dealing with everything from climate change to energy policy, and concern is building in some Democratic circles about whether this is the point at which he will finally appoint a prominent liberal to his Cabinet.

After a swift set of appointments that firmly established, some say reinforced, Obama’s centrist bona fides, lefties are grumbling (most quietly for fear of seeming intemperate and/or ungracious) that having fought the good fight they are being left out. “He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet,” Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America told Politico, in a story about the growing unease among some in the party. “But we do hope that before it’s all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment.”

David Corn, who leads the Mother Jones news bureau in Washington, used a piece in the Washington Post on Sunday to detail the disappointment Obama’s appointments have so far generated among liberals: “The more things change, the more they stay . . . well, you know,” Corn wrote. “And looking at President-elect Barack Obama’s top appointments, it’s easy to wonder whether convention has triumphed over change—and centrists over progressives.”

This may just be a timing issue because sooner or later this was going to happen; the left was eventually going to make demands on Obama that he would not be able to meet. The question at this point is how long the preternaturally self-righteous onlookings on either side of the argument can contain themselves in the interest of party unity. Eventually there will be a debate about who is owed what and what it means for the future of the party. Moderates want credit for winning in place likes Virginia and Indiana; liberals want credit for having been right all along about George Bush, about Iraq, about Hillary Clinton. Obama’s tasks will be to keep the two factions happy, not so much with each other, but with him. So far the moderates are taken care of.
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Obama should get the benefit of the doubt from liberals, initially, at least, because he has been so successful in slaying so many iconic lefty dragons; Bush, McCain, Palin, Hillary and Bill Clinton. And he should get extra credit for being so efficient in assembling his cabinet: Competence can be very seductive, even to the most ideological.

Frankly, even the liberals must understand that there is nothing that Obama has said or done thus far that has surprised anyone. They entered into a small conspiracy of silence to get him elected, but they knew well his centrist/compromiser tendencies. In his Meet the Press interview last weekend, he spelled them out again.

“Just in terms of our appointments, I am very proud of the speed with which we have started to put together our core economic team, our national security team, but also the excellence of the candidates,” he said. “And I, I think that it’s an indication of part of the change I was talking about during the campaign, an emphasis on competence, an emphasis on people who are non-ideological and pragmatic and just want to do business.”

Liberals want to do business; not with everyone, but they expect to be able to do business with Obama. What they are wondering is whether he will want to do business with them.

“With these hawkish, [Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob] Rubin-esque, middle-of-the-road picks, has Obama abandoned the folks who brought him to the dance?” Corn wonders out loud about the Cabinet.

Those lefty jitters gained a little more traction this week, when they generated a heated response from senior Obama adviser Steve Hildebrand on the Huffington Post. Hildy’s very pointed advice to the liberals: Not now; the problems we face are too big for us to get bogged down in ideological sniping. Hildebrand makes the point that Obama was elected by a wide cross section of Americans to be president of all the people, not just the left.

The worry on the left is that he will worry about appeasing everyone else, while taking them for granted, or worse, using liberals as a foil to shore up his centrists’ credentials.

Obama has made the point that he is not done picking, so it may be again just a matter of timing. It may be that despite their early disappointment, liberals ought to heed the words of Atticus Finch, after Tom Robinson’s murder conviction in To Kill a Mockingbird: “It’s not time to worry yet …We’re not through yet.”

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It’s become something of a parlor game for the chattering class to compare President-elect Barack Obama to the pantheon of presidents.

Is Obama the second coming of Abraham Lincoln? A recent Newsweek magazine cover cast Honest Abe’s long shadow behind the incoming president’s silhouette. Inside, writers Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe found the parallels between the two men irresistible. “It is the season to compare Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln,” they wrote. “Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis.”

Or is Obama the reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt? Time magazine thinks so, putting a fused portrait of the two men on its cover.

At times, even Obama encourages the idea that he’s channeling both of those beloved presidents. He often compares himself to Lincoln, invoking the Great Emancipator in speeches and in his very open effort to choose a cabinet with echoes of Lincoln’s “team of rivals.”

He also claims Roosevelt as a mentor. “What you see in FDR that I hope my team can emulate, is not always getting it right, but projecting a sense of confidence, and a willingness to try things, and experiment in order to get people working again,” Obama said.

Enough already with the dead white presidents. There’s an equally—perhaps more—apt yardstick by which to measure Obama: South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.

Similar to Mandela’s 1994 election as the first black president of South Africa, Obama’s victory as the first black U.S. president is a globally recognized historical moment. But the similarities between the two men extend beyond skin color or prideful racial milestones.

Mandela was an international figure, admired abroad even more than at home, which made him and his “change” policies all more palatable for domestic consumption.

Just as Obama will, Mandela took over in his country during a period of fierce financial stress, debilitating social divisions and worldwide revulsion at the ruling party’s refusal to change its discredited policies. And, pushing the analogy to the limit, South Africa was even at war—a civil war that raged in impoverished township streets—that further divided the country at home and alienated it abroad.

Confident in his own skin, Mandela assumed black South African’s allegiance and affection. But he understood equally well that he had to prove himself to skeptical whites, if he was to keep the country from flying off in divergent directions. His early moves as president revealed the deft leadership qualities that kept his base with him and expanded his popularity among critics.

Mandela smiled a lot. That smile spoke volumes, setting aside the fears of the minority white population, convincing them that he meant them no harm. He proclaimed himself South African uber alles, above all else.

“We place our vision of change on the table not as conquerors but as fellow citizens,” Mandela said in a speech before 80,000 supporters who gathered in Cape Town to celebrate his election.

Mandela demonstrated his concept of national unity by giving his defeated rivals powerful portfolios in his African National Congress cabinet. He named former President F.W. deKlerk, who presided over the apartheid-loving National Party and came in second in the 1994 election, one of two deputy presidents. He named three other rivals to senior administration posts, including Home Affairs minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party and Finance minister Derek Keys of the National Party.

One especially controversial appointment was the choice of Pik Botha as minister of Minerals and Energy, a fiscally important post in the diamond-based economy of the country. Botha was a widely disliked figure among black South Africans and within the global community of anti-apartheid activists because he had long served as foreign minister to President deKlerk and former President P.W. Botha (no relation).

Needless to say, there was even more teeth-gnashing over the Botha appointment and the other Nats than can be heard today over Obama’s choice of Clinton-era appointees to his cabinet.

But Mandela had a plan to win over his critics: Kill them with kindness and cooperation. And guess what? It worked.

While some on Mandela’s left quietly grumbled (notably his estranged wife, Winnie Mandela, who was also included in the first post-apartheid cabinet), those on the right drowned them out with applause.

In 1994, the far-right National Review rarely offered a kind word about black South Africa’s freedom struggle. But it did consider incoming President Mandela as the “Indispensable Man.”

History anoints such indispensable leaders. At other dire moments in history, Lincoln and Roosevelt proved to be the tonic for this nation’s ills. Now the Oval Office belongs to Obama.

Since winning his election, the president-elect has been as solid and sure-footed as he was during the campaign. He’s sought out the best minds and surrounded himself with talented, if not universally popular, advisers. He’s slowly and deliberately set in motion a plan to turn campaign talk into real policies of his administration. And he’s reminded a Bush-weary nation that one president serves at a time, a tease to the change that’s on the way.

But the qualities that will make Obama a good, if not great, president demand that he resists limiting himself and the nation to an American-only standard. Exemplars of historic leadership can—and often do—come from beyond our borders. Mandela’s intelligence, oratorical skills and global embrace allowed South Africa to remain intact and prosper at a critical juncture in his nation’s history.

Obama would be wise to follow his example.

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It has become a near mantra for the president-elect: “We have only one president at a time.” But as the last days of the Bush administration dwindle away, it looks more and more like that one president is Barack Obama. Over the weekend, while Bush was flipping a coin at the Army/Navy game, Obama was publicly laying out a vision for reviving the economy and America’s role in the world. And if his fast-graying hair is any indication, he is already taking the new job very seriously.

In his most wide-ranging policy interview since he was elected, Obama rambled extensively on the economy, the troubles in Southeast Asia, the U.S.-Russian relationship, the terms under which the U.S. should engage Iran and his plan to bring jazz and poetry to the White House.

In the interview, taped Saturday in Chicago and broadcast Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Obama said he expected the economy to get worse before it got better; that his task in fixing it will be easier than what President Roosevelt faced in the 1930s; and that despite their own strategic mistakes, he believes that U.S. auto manufacturers are the “backbone of American manufacturing” and deserve government help to survive their current problems.

Obama’s facility with the facts and his quick and elaborate analyses of the world he will confront as president seems a striking departure from what we have come to expect during President Bush’s tenure. The Obama presidency, it was easy to imagine watching the interview, could become a series of wonky seminars on domestic and foreign policy, with Obama as the chief facilitator.

He was unequivocal about Osama bin Laden: “…we’ve got to get bin Laden, and we’ve got to get al-Qaeda.”

He was circumspect about taxes: “My economic team right now is examining, do we repeal that through legislation? Do we let it lapse, so that when the Bush tax cuts expire they’re not renewed when it comes to the wealthiest Americans? And we don’t yet know what the best approach is going to be…”

He was “heartbroken” about the issues confronting veterans: “When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling, even more than those who have not served—higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate—it breaks my heart.”

He was nuanced, but expansive, in his discussions about how to deal with Iran: “I think we need to ratchet up tough but direct diplomacy with Iran, making very clear to them that their development of nuclear weapons would be unacceptable, that their funding of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, their threats against Israel are contrary to everything that we believe in and what the international community should accept, and present a set of carrots and sticks in, in changing their calculus about how they want to operate.”

On Saturday, on the heels of the announcement of dramatic job losses and their impact on the economy, Obama used his weekly radio address to promote a jobs recovery program he hopes Congress will act on shortly after his inauguration. He told Meet the Press moderator Tom Brokaw that what he has proposed will be the “largest infrastructure program—in roads and bridges and, and other traditional infrastructure—since the building of the federal highway system in the 1950s.”

For all the wrestling with thorny domestic and foreign policy issues, Obama also signals that he hopes to change the White House, Washington and the country in other ways. Toward the end of the interview, Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, hoped to use their influence to bring more attention to art, music and the exploration of science than exists today. Any serious attention to the arts will likely conjur up more Camelot-esque comparisons to the Kennedys. (Speaking of the Kennedys, Obama declined to weigh in on the weekend’s juiciest bit of news, that Caroline Kennedy may be interested in the Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton.)

During the wide-ranging discussion, Obama showed just one flicker of weakness. Prodded by Brokaw to address the status of his smoking habit, Obama admitted that he had on occasion “fallen off the wagon.” Most Americans will likely cut the guy a break. Fighting through the longest presidential campaign in history to become the country’s first African-American president as the nation descends into economic freefall could send just about anyone out back for a smoke. But Obama assured Brokaw that he will not violate the White House smoking ban. “What I would say is, is that I have done a terrific job under the circumstances of making myself much healthier, and I think that you will not see any violations of these rules in the White House.” Of all the ethical and political lapses that have occurred in the White House in the past 16 years, a puff would hardly rank in the top 10. But here’s hoping there’s enough Nicorette around the place to keep him honest.

Berbagi

The idea is to find the right match. Soul mates or perhaps a team of rivals? If only there were an eHarmony for presidential transitions, Thomas Jefferson might get matched with Condoleezza Rice: “Widower, nation’s first SoS, seeks SBF, preferably also former SoS, for ‘diplomatic’ liaison at country estate. Turn-ons include long trips to France; turn-offs include ‘preemptive’ war and Sudoku.”

Well, maybe not…

But somewhere between the respective talents of our first and latest secretaries of state lies the key to understanding the logic of the Obama foreign policy team. On one hand, the author of the Declaration of Independence might have been a bit overqualified, and on the other, Condi, the Russian-speaking Cold War theorist might have been just a tad overmatched by Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

Obama’s biggest problem regarding diplomacy is that he’ll always be sending the second-best person to do the job. Any other president would want to send Obama as a special envoy to smooth things out in India and Pakistan after the Mumbai siege because if you combine Jay-Z’s world-beating, New Jack CEO vibe with Bill Clinton’s Oxford-tinged, “This-kebab-is-delicious!” populism, you have Obama’s worldwide appeal wrapped up in a sepia-toned nutshell.

Obama can’t be everywhere at once. He’s bringing in a team that has the chops to get the job done without his day-to-day micromanagement: Sen. Hillary Clinton at State; Obama campaign adviser and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Dr. Susan Rice as U.N. Ambassador; Bush holdover Sec. Robert Gates at Defense, and former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Gen. Jim Jones in the White House as national security adviser. Here’s why it could work:

Madame Secrétaire

Foreign policy mavens Tom Friedman and David Ignatius don’t love it. They anticipate cognitive dissonance between Clinton, the consummate insider, and Obama, the wunderkind. Ignatius warns against “subcontracting” Obama’s agenda to Clinton, and Friedman points out that foreign leaders can see daylight between the views of the president and the secretary of state “from 1,000 miles away”—valid points, to be sure.

But if one thing was demonstrated in 2008, it is that Obama is no rookie when it comes to dealing with foreign leaders. And skeptics might reflect on the events of 2002, when then Secretary of State Colin Powell—with years of experience and a war hero’s reservoir of goodwill—wound up behind a microphone at the U.N. General Assembly, pitching the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld war plan with a bootleg PowerPoint presentation. The lesson, then and now, is that a strong president will make the final call, even when the secretary of state has an independent political platform.

Five of the first eight presidents were secretaries of state. If Clinton wants to run for president in 2016, it’s as good a résumé item as any for her. The hitch is that she’s won’t even be the second woman to hold the post, so there’s no historic “first” feather for her cap. She’s going to have to get things done, not just hype her own brand, if she wants to gain anything from her tenure at Foggy Bottom. And that’s how it fits together for Obama. She advances her own cause by advancing his.

Gates Locked

The plan to leave Gates at the Department of Defense has probably been brewing for a while—Obama always knew he’d have to have a Republican somewhere in his Cabinet—and anyone who managed to tidy up some of Don “Kickin’ it with Saddam” Rumsfeld’s mess in Iraq might wind up being useful for a couple more years.

Retaining Gates sends a message to the military brass that Obama doesn’t plan to tinker with things that aren’t broken and signals that policy changes don’t always require personnel changes. Hopefully, Obama will set things back to how they’re supposed to be—presidents set policy and the pros at the Pentagon figure out the best way to carry it out.

Rice, Redux

Susan Rice, in terms of credentials and personal relationship with Obama is roughly the equivalent of outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—well-connected bureaucrats without political constituencies of their own. We’d have been better off if President Clinton had left Albright as his Ambassador to the U.N., and if President Bush had appointed Condi Rice as his, rather than throwing her into the deep end as national security adviser and secretary of state. Obama was right to check his personal comfort level at the door and stash Rice at the U.N. for now. If Clinton can’t get things done by 2012, Rice will be ready for a call up to the bigs.

” Kool Aide ”

While it’s harder for a layman to get a feel for what Gen. Jim Jones will be like as national security adviser, that’s probably a good thing. We’ve had too many famous national security advisers in recent years, writing memoirs and snitching on former colleagues. It seems like these days no one can be counted on to come in, collect a paycheck and quietly pave the way in the developing world for Taco Bell, Windows Vista and Sasha Fierce. National security adviser is the kind of position that should be feared silently, like Al Neri or Chris Partlow. With Jones, we may just have our man. Don’t sleep on this guy…literally.

Obama won’t be playing Stratego or Risk when January 20, 2009 rolls around. The list of global crises facing the incoming administration is daunting—terrorism, rogue nukes, pirates on the high seas (really—pirates). But when you take Obama’s A-list foreign policy/national defense team, throw in former Foreign Relations Committee Chair and Vice President-elect Joe Biden, current Foreign Relations Committee Chair Sen. John Kerry and his quad-lingual, white “African-American” wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Obama might just be in a situation where he can delegate and still cover a lot of ground. If Rice and the Kerrys cover sub-Saharan Africa, Biden covers the former Soviet bloc, Gates ties things up in Iraq, President Obama himself holds down “South Central” (the Tehran-Kabul-Islamabad-New Delhi circuit), Jones covers Israel and the Arab world, and former Vice President Al Gore takes care of Mother Earth, then that would leave, roughly, France, for Hillary Clinton to take care of, and she’ll do just fine.

Berbagi

The day after America elected a black man president, a bundle of Washington Post newspapers were going for $400 on eBay. The L.A. Times made a cool 600K in Barack Obama merchandise. The ailing newspaper industry briefly got its swagger back when people realized that they couldn’t frame their computer.

Unfortunately, that is not where Obamaphernalia ends. Right now, as I type this essay, I am wearing Obama socks. Knotted at my neck is an Obama tie. I’m wearing Obama underwear, an Obama sweater, Obama flip flops and Obama cuff links. I’m munching on my Obama ‘Os cereal.

OK, so I am not wearing those things, but the point is I could be.

The other point is WTF?
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The King family has long been criticized for its gangsterous guarding of MLK’s image.

They sic their legal dogs on anyone who deigns to use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s image on T-shirts. News media? Fifth-grade civics class? Pay up or they’ll see you in court.

When the family sued to get a cut of the King-Obama merchandise, some of us doubted the family’s claim that it’s not about the money, but rather maintaining the integrity of the brand. No more.

We finally get it. Some suit, somewhere out there, should be protecting the legacy of our first black president from the Obama thong. In fact, his first act as president shouldn’t be to straighten out the war or restart the economy, it should be to get his name off the thong. It should be a bill, and Congress should pass it immediately.

I understand that we are a microwave culture that processes moments in minutes. I was in D.C. when ex-mayor Marion Barry was caught smoking crack, and I was there the next day when everyone and their Uncle Claudell had a “The Bitch Set Me Up” T-shirt.

But I have never seen anything like the Obama madness. I mean the Obama cereal promises, “a spoonful of hope in every bowl.” Even the most famous image of Obama, the face cast off into light looking both determined and focused painted in red, white and blue with the words, “Hope” and “Progress” is not immune. Stamped underneath is an image of its creator, the one-time graffiti artist, Shepard Fairey.

Obama is a man, not a demi-god, and having his face on everything from cereal to plates is borderline weird. I don’t blame people for making this stuff since we are a consumer-driven culture, and everyone is looking to make a fast buck. I am more worried about the person who wants to eat a ham sandwich off a Barack Obama dinner plate. That is odd.

If you want to know why our economy sucks, look at anyone who would spend $10 on a 24-karat-gold-plated commemorative Barack Obama coin. That person should be flogged, publicly. I am all for branding, in fact I understand it to be part of marketing 101, but too much ice cream can cause weight gain. We are stuffed full of Obama, and he hasn’t even been sworn into office yet.

Consumerism is one thing, but killing the spirit of the election and plastering the man’s face on everything from hats to thongs is overkill. Before the election, Obama even joked with radio personality Big Tigger about it all. When Tigger asked Obama how it felt to be a cultural icon, Obama laughed and said, “I have put a lot of brothers in business. I have seen the shirts.”

We’ve all seen the shirts. Now stop it.

Berbagi