Obama's Democratic Party?
By Ronald Walters
May 21, 2008
Most important, the Jackson campaigns for president in 1984 and 1988, helped change the party's delegate selection rules, without which Obama could not have won so many delegates. Also, Jackson's themes of hope and change run through Obama's campaign and have connected not only with blacks but whites in a time of significant need and despair. By the 1988 election, Jackson had won seven million votes (600,000 of them from whites) and arrived at the 1988 Convention with over 1,200 delegates.
With this performance he became leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party and helped Ron Brown to become the first Black Democratic party Chair.
Ronald Reagan had helped to successfully create the notion that the Democratic party was the party of Blacks and this inference led many whites into the Republican party. Therefore, when Bill Clinton seized control of the Democratic party as its nominee in 1992, his campaign initiated the kind of the racial politics we see now, by executing a black mentally challenged convict Ricky Ray Rector and criticizing rap singer Sister Souljah at Rev. Jackson's convention in January of that year.
The point was to telegraph to the Reagan Democrats that they could come back home, that blacks should not be perceived any longer as leading the party.
In office, instead of fighting to continue the Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson legacy of the party, Bill Clinton created a "third way" between that legacy and the Conservative, Newt Gingrich ideology. Inside the party they also created the Democratic Leadership Council, headed now by Black former Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. He was on "Meet the Press" (5/18/08) discussing the special election Democratic victory in a Mississippi House district that George Bush had won by 25 percemt in 2004 and said that in places like that, "You can't run a liberal campaign. It was a conservative Democrat, moderate Democrat approach. That approach is on the ascendancy in the party. If Barack Obama adopts that approach, he will enjoy more success in many places around the country and might be able to expand a map to the extent his team is suggesting."
If this approach is really on the ascendancy in the party, it raises a question about what the control of the Democratic party apparatus by Barack Obama will mean and specifically will black interests be sacrificed again for Democrats to win the White House. In the 2006 election, "Blue Dog" Democrats (of which Ford was a member) increased their numbers to equal that of the Congressional Black Caucus. If the Reagan Democrats do come home and their numbers in Congress increase, will Obama feel obliged to follow their lead?
So, it seems that when Obama captures control of the party at the August Convention, Black leaders will have to be diligent about what happens to both the party and the issues as he moves toward the White House.
Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland.