Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama, the two most important black leaders in American history, operated in vastly different eras and political arenas — under a strikingly similar set of ground rules.
King and Obama — born 32 years apart — both learned that an African-American leader needs to link racial equality to the broader cause of economic justice that included white, working- and middle-class Americans in order to avoid failure, backlash and marginalization.
To that end, Obama will spotlight his fallen hero’s unfinished economic agenda when he celebrates the 50th anniversary of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech on Wednesday, leveraging an event most Americans view as strictly a racial milestone into something bigger — and more useful to a struggling president: A rationale for his second-term agenda.
Obama’s ability to blend class and race messages — to select the most aspirational elements of each — is a key to understanding his success. It’s his go-to power move, the political equivalent of a LeBron crossover dribble, the strategy that helped him bridge the gap between prophet and president.
“For Obama, economics is a safe way to talk about race,” said Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a three-volume history of the King era widely regarded as the definitive chronicle of the civil rights movement.
“Even though he’s the first black president, he’s in a tiptoe stance on race — that’s a phrase I borrowed from King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.’ It makes him nervous. He can’t even ask the most basic question which he’s begging to ask: To what degree is the partisan gridlock that is frustrating his attempts to govern racially driven?” says Branch.
Via: Politico
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