Sen. Barack Obama's popularity among the professorial set, as some of my readers observed, might be a source of grave concern to his handlers (see the commentator MARY CUNNINGHAM). Scholars, undoubtedly, have many sterling virtues. But representing the will of the American people is not one of them. George McGovern and Michael Dukakis, it must be noted, were also highly esteemed on campus. The Obama people, I bet, probably understand this. Since he is not running for president of UC Berkeley, they will probably not saturate news cycles with too many images of him working rope lines on the quads of America.
I also suggested that secularists may be somewhat surprised, if not dismayed, by the degree to which Obama is willing (in his rhetoric anyhow) to distance himself from classic Democratic positions on church/state separation. A few secular commentators noted that they are not overly concerned about this possibility. The senator’s expertise in constitutional law, they argued, virtually guarantees that he will never do anything to compromise the impregnability of The Wall (see the remarks of TJFRMLA and NORRIE HOYT). Their argument strikes me as plausible.
Many also raised the question of social race, wondering if America was ready to elect a qualified African-American as president (See ENDER versus ARMINIUS and the comments of RICH EVANS, CHRISTOPHER, DARREN and ESPO). I have intentionally avoided this issue, waiting to treat it at greater length in a forthcoming Heidelberg dissertation. For now, it might be helpful to break down the query into various parts. Would an African-American be able to win the Democratic Party’s nomination? The answer, I believe, is yes.
Would the Republican base composed of White Evangelicals vote for him in a national election? I don’t know. And I also don’t know if it is useful to refract the question strictly through the prism of social race. Let me phrase it this way: would White Evangelicals favor the liberal Protestant Obama over the conservative Mormon Romney, or the Catholic Giuliani? Put differently, would Evangelicals sooner vote for their issues than for a co-religionist, albeit one from the Mainline denominations? True, their co-religionist is black, but he is blue as well (On the "issues" aspect of his lack of appeal to Evangelicals see MULOPWEPAUL). So we ought not stampede to the conclusion that all ballots not cast for Barack Obama are indicative of racial bias among White Evangelicals.
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
