The Obama Generation

New York : Doubleday, 2009.


An interesting excerpt from what promises to be a good book. A couple of interesting phrases.

"I'd like Barack Obama to be president," Mr. Young said, to a burst of applause from a small hometown audience in 2007. But then he added: "In 2016." The applauders were caught up short. A few booed. At that point, Mr. Young was still supporting his old friend Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama, he decided, wasn't even close to ready. "It's not a matter of being inexperienced," Mr. Young said in a matter-of-fact tone. "It's a matter of being young."

In 1968 he was 36. Being young didn't get in his way.

What Mr. Young exposed that night in Atlanta was a rift between black politicians born in the 1930s and 1940s and those born in the 1960s and 1970s. "I had a hard time believing the Obama phenomenon," he admitted a year later. The world view of the older politicians, many of them preachers like Mr. Young, was defined by limitation. They couldn't eat at lunch counters. They couldn't sit where they liked on buses or vote how and for whom they liked. They couldn't attend the schools they preferred or aspire to the jobs they believed they were qualified to hold. Every time one of those barriers fell, it was power seized, not given. They marched, they preached, and they protested.

Excellent point: Andrew Young had to fight for power; he couldn't understand that Obama didn't have to, in good part because of what he had done.

Another reason Mr. Obama had some trouble convincing black voters is because it had seldom been done this way before. Most black elected officials would never have been elected to office if they had to rely on white voters. Instead, they benefited from a civil-rights movement that created power through artfully drawn black majority districts. Once inside the circle, officials elected from these districts -- especially in Congress -- acquired a power of incumbency that virtually guaranteed re-election, year after year after year. The white political power structure, happy with separate but equal, generally looked the other way to protect their own politically safe preserves.

Separate but equal; a fascinating phrase.

Mr. Obama and other new generation politicians like him correctly saw the change coming. The most well-known black leaders had begun to age out. The big names -- Jesse Jackson Sr., Vernon Jordan and Colin Powell -- are in their sixties and seventies.

Joseph Lowery is 87. Martin would have been 80.

The Obama generation is, for the most part, in their thirties, forties, or at most fifties, with their own networks and ideas about the best way to seize power.

At most 50s; whew! I just make it.

With few exceptions, most younger black politicians around the country embraced Mr. Obama immediately as a kindred spirit. For the civil-rights icons, it was more complicated. Oakland, California Mayor Ron Dellums, 72, chose to support Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Obama, but even he acknowledged the shifting winds. Black leaders, he said, have got to stop treating change as a threat. "You have to update your analysis, update the nature of your politics," he says. "You can't be 1958, you can't be 1968, you have to be 2008, but you build on those realities."

Meanwhile, civil-rights luminaries like Roger Wilkins, a 76-year-old historian, journalist and veteran activists saw Mr. Obama's rise as a natural evolution. "I love this transition," he said, "because my generation has done its work. Whatever one thinks of the result of that work, it was consequential work, and it did help change the nation."

"But now we're old," he continued, "and there are people whose path we made possible who see the country very, very differently than we did."