A little more on Crouch, but not quite...

Not to pile on, but I thought the following comments were really perceptive and get at a fundamental problem with comparing Obama to other black people on TV. From commenter Ben:

In the mind of Stanley Crouch, Barack Obama is a black politician, and Louis Farrakhan is a black politician, and therefore they are an obvious pair to compare and contrast.

That's pretty ridiculous, in the sense that there are plenty of people one could compare Obama to and learn more than comparing him to Farrakhan. These include both white and black politicians of Obama's generation. And Farrakhan's illness has basically removed him from the national scene. Obama and Farrakhan really don't have much in common beyond the ability to draw a crowd. Oh, and blackness. Which seems to be the main thing Stanley Crouch sees. If a white pundit was obsessed with making this comparison, even favorably to Obama, I would pretty much call it straight-up racism, or racialist thinking at best. Maybe we shouldn't call it that from Crouch. But, maybe we should.

And

What I'm seeing is that Crouch is stuck on the Farrakhan bogeyman as a crutch for his arguments. Again, I don't think he's using it against Obama; actually I think he's disregarding all the other political figures who weren't Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson. He's slanting the argument by using Farrakhan as symbol of the old, when there were plenty of non-extreme black politicians 20 years ago too. Harold Washington or John Lewis didn't get crowds of hundreds of thousands of people when they ran for office, but if it wasn't for people like them, Barack would not be where he is now.

I don't disbelieve his argument about increased diversity and post-simplicity. But I don't think one can prove that the attitudes of the country toward race have changed, by comparing an extreme figure like Farrakhan to a mainstream one like Obama. Of course they have different appeals, because they're very different people.

A more interesting evolution in politicians, to me, is from the generation of big-city black pols who got elected as pioneers, often on civil rights cred (Harold Washington, Marion Barry, Tom Bradley, Andrew Young, ...) to a new generation who get elected as technocrats (Cory Booker, Michael Nutter).

There's been this weird temptation to compare Barack Obama's style of leadership with Jesse Jackson's and Al Sharpton's. I've done it myself many, many times. I think Ben gets to the heart of why that comparison is bogus, sloppy and lazy. Obama isn't an activist. He reps for the state of Illinois. Civil Rights leaders, likewise, rep for whatever cause they chose. Farrakhan isn't running for office. He isn't passing any legislation. He isn't holding any hearings. Likewise, I don't expect Obama to be leading a protest march. If you're going to compare him, it's best to juxtapose him with other actual politicians. Compare him to Edmund Edward Brooke or Doug Wilder. If you want to dis the past, at least give me a Sharpe James.

The "Obama v. Farrakhan" thing or "Obama v. Sharpton" thing or even the "Obama v. Jesse" thing appeals to two types of people. White people who despise those three. And black people, frankly like me, who get sick of those dudes being stand-ins for "what the Negroes think." But it's sloppy thinking that gives no regard to either party--it just lumps them together in a box called "Famous Black People Interest In Politics." I remember Tim Russert foolishly asking Barack Obama about something Harry Belafonte said. I remember thinking, What the fuck does Obama know about Belafonte? He's representing Illinois. That's his job. Let Harry be Harry.