Beyond the ‘new’ black pol

There’s something different about Obama’s generation. But what?

President George W. Bush (center) poses with President-elect Barack Obama (second from left) and former presidents George H.W. Bush (left), Bill Clinton (fourth from left) and Jimmy Carter on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. Much of the coverage of Obama’s ascent has focused on the notion that he is a “new” breed of black politician, but few reports have explored what makes he and others “new.” (AP photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Kenneth J. Cooper

Even before he succeeded in capturing the White House, Barack Obama spawned a wave of stories heralding “a new generation” of black politicians who successfully appeal to white voters.

But Obama, Gov. Deval Patrick and other politicians so identified do not belong to a new generation — a word that, on journalists’ keyboards, seems to have lost its age-related meaning. Both Obama and Patrick are baby boomers, who are decidedly not new in political office. In other cases, black officeholders who do not even belong to the same generation have been lumped together and labeled “new.”

The New York Times has been a serial offender. Last week, an article asserted that the Congressional Black Caucus “is in the midst of an uneasy generational shift, as the old lions of the civil rights era begin to give way to a younger generation of black politicians who do not want to be pigeonholed by race.”

That shift has already occurred: Most Congressional Black Caucus members are, again, boomers, and have outnumbered “the old lions” since the 1990s.

A Times front-pager in October, which ran under the headline “Quiet Political Shifts as More Blacks Are Elected,” is an example of another kind of confusion. Of the six black politicians cited as examples of “a new generation of black elected officials who are wooing white voters and winning local elections in predominantly white districts across the country,” five are baby boomers, and one was born in 1944, a year before that generation began.

A much-discussed article in an August issue of the Times Magazine, titled “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”, was even more confused. Wedged into the same generation with Obama and Patrick were three younger officeholders who legitimately belong to the next generation: Newark Mayor Cory Booker, born in 1969; Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, born in 1967; and Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, born in 1965.

Now, there can be some fuzziness about when certain generations begin and end, but the baby boom — clearly defined as the 20-year-period from the end of World War II in 1945 through 1964 — is not one of them. Obama was born in 1961, Patrick in 1956.

The Times is hardly the only publication to birth a generation to fit this facile, preconceived construct. LexisNexis and Google searches for a “new generation” of black politicians turn up numerous examples from, for example, The Washington Post, Time, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Associated Press.

This stock interpretation, besides being wrong, neglects the kind of probing that this significant political trend merits.

The big question: What has made more white voters willing to vote for black candidates?

What types of experiences — in desegregated schools, workplaces, neighborhoods or elsewhere — have shaped these voters’ attitudes toward the candidates? In what parts of the country has racially polarized voting broken down, and where may it still prevail? What may account for those regional differences?

Instead of lumping the new black candidates into a generation free-floating above time, why aren’t more journalists asking what — rather than age — binds these candidates together?

What kinds of experiences have shaped their ability to successfully appeal to white voters? Are the candidates offering similar political messages, or campaigning in similar styles? What might they have in common with black pioneers who won in predominantly white electorates, most notably former senators Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois?

Pursuing both lines of questioning — why white voter attitudes have changed and what truly makes these emergent black politicians different — would surely produce more thoughtful coverage of black politics than newspaper readers have been getting for four long years. The midwife of a supposedly new generation of black politicians was the uplifting speech that Obama gave to the Democratic National Convention at the TD Banknorth Garden in 2004, when he was still an Illinois state senator but the prohibitive favorite to win a U.S. Senate seat that November.