Dag. It never occurred to me that Harold Washington’s time as mayor was sort of a preview for Obama’s time as president.
It’s the same thing that Obama describes as missing from the example of the man who helped bring him into politics, Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington. Obama arrived in Chicago halfway through Washington’s first term. Washington had pulled off a thrilling victory to become mayor, but two years later he was stymied by racial factionalism, with old-school white aldermen on the council blocking his every move. It took a federal court redrawing the city’s gerrymandered electoral map to break the deadlock. But it came too late for Washington, who died of a heart attack early in his second term. Ultimately, Richard Daley, son of the former mayor and, as Obama calls him, a ‘scion of the old order’, reclaimed the throne. So what lessons did Obama take from Washington’s initial triumph and ultimate failure? ‘I saw how the tremendous energy of the movement couldn’t be sustained without structure, skills and organisation in government. I saw how a political campaign based on racial redress, no matter how reasonable, generated fear and backlash and ultimately placed limits on progress. And in the rapid collapse of Harold’s coalition after his death, I saw the danger of relying on a single charismatic individual to bring about change.’ Some of Obama’s caution about racial politics makes sense in the light of this, including over the past year, as he engineered the nomination of Joe Biden for president and warned the Democratic Party, particularly its younger wing, against over-committing to the Black Lives Matter agenda. But what about the other side of the equation, the need to get beyond a reliance on one person to bring about change?
Obama didn’t seem to notice this either.
This is from
David Runciman’s review of Obama’s book. It is a pretty sharp review, though I’ve only read the first couple chapters of that book.