CONSPICUOUSLY ABSENT. Not for nothing, Senator Obama, but you should probably run for cover. Joe Klein may be about to subject you to one of his big old man-crushes. This can't be easy for Joe. After all, the last one of these he had was on that smiling hunk o' red-hot centrism from the Ozarks who ultimately threw him over for Sidney Blumenthal and then a chubby staffer. So it's understandable that Joe would be proceeding cautiously here. Once burned and all.
The most interesting passage scrawled on the cover of Joe's Social Studies notebook of the mind is the one in which he writes down the names of other way-cool African Americans, and reinforces it with a quote from Shelby Steele, which is very often a problem, about how white people love the black people who don't make white people feel too badly about themselves.
We are, according to Steele, grateful for this. Joe certainly is. His list includes Colin Powell, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods. (Holy Pudding Pops, Batman, where's The Cos?) He even refers to something called "the Colin Powell mania of 1995." This was when the general bruited about the possibility that he might run for president until a couple of evangelical pecksniffs called a press conference and beat him up. From this we must conclude that Joe's standards for "mania" are tolerably low.
And, anyway, there's one name missing from this list, and it's a name that Joe Klein would rather drive ten-penny nails into his eyeballs than ever mention. It's a name that would guarantee that Shelby Steele would never speak to Joe after study hall ever again. In March of 1988, as Marshall Frady writes in his essential biography, Jesse Jackson won the Michigan caucuses with 55 percent of the vote, beating the eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, by nearly four touchdowns. He received 22 percent of the white vote, four times more than he'd received in 1984, in that campaign that had cratered over "Hymietown" and Louis Farrakhan. A week earlier, in the 21 primaries held on Super Tuesday, he'd won or finished second in 16 of them.
On the morning after the Michigan vote, Jackson had received more votes than any other candidate, and he probably led in the delegate count as well. It was a brief moment, charged by economic populism, in which Jackson's longtime supporters were joined by unemployed white steelworkers and pipefitters. It didn't last, and Jackson has descended into floundering irrelevance. (Although, to be completely honest, nothing Jackson's done in the past decade comes close to the pathetic spectacle of Colin Powell's bobo act in front of the UN.) But it's certainly more relevant to the discussion of Obama's future than is the relative popularity of a professional golfer.
--Charles P. Pierce
