If Obama Loses, Would the Party Truly Be Over for Democrats?

By: Erin Aubry Kaplan

Would black folks desert the Democratic party if Obama loses the election? I hardly think so.

First, of all, none of us expected a black man in any party to get this far, and the fact Obama’s a Democrat actually reflects well on them (even if some Democrats fought his nomination internally).

Second, and more important, we wouldn’t blame the Democrats for a loss -- we would blame a racist society, and that goes deeper than any party affiliation. As universally supportive as they’ve been of their candidate, black people long ago accepted the possibility that this election will not go the way they’d like. And what else is new?

“People are already preparing for Obama to lose,” a black friend of mine, a staunch Democrat, said to me recently. “We’re just happy that he’s got this far and that he’s alive. We’re ready for the fact he could lose even though all the polls say that he’ll win.”

Call it informed cynicism: In the end, history simply has not been on our side. Besides, we’re seasoned enough to know that one black elected official will not, or cannot, change our collective fortune. At this point we’ve had plenty of history-making elected officials and appointees – Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell – who’ve meant very little for our progress; they often actually work against it.

We do have more hope that Obama will change that dynamic because he’s running for the highest office in the land and will be theoretically calling the shots. But that still could mean that he’s merely going to be a creature of the status quo. It would be nice for him to address issues of importance to black people because he’s black too, but nobody’s taking that for granted.

As Amiri Baraka pointed out to me on NPR last month, Obama’s running for president, not the president of the NAACP. Baraka went on to say that the best we can do for ourselves is to elect the man and form a progressive caucus to keep his feet to the fire, hold him to his highest ideals.

The biggest issue is really our own failure to hold any politician accountable to an agenda we should push every year, not just in 2008. Many black folk (including me, I confess) are also holding out hope that Obama’s keeping a few of his more radical ideals under wraps until he’s safely esconced in the White House.

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