In Whose Shoes Is Obama Standing?

Will Barack Obama be able to overturn the old framework of American Exceptionalism from its foreign policy to lay foundations for a more equitable relationship with the world?

01 November 2010
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama welcoming Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and wife Gursharan Kaur to the White House in November 2009.
Jason Reed / REUTERS
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama welcoming Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and wife Gursharan Kaur to the White House in November 2009.
Jason Reed / REUTERS

FOR MOST AMERICAN LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS, the astonishing election of a black man to the nation’s highest office provided the main narrative needed to understand Barack Obama. The president was defined by his race—and the president’s race, in turn, defined a new moment in American history.

Beautiful metaphors were used to describe Obama’s ascent. Cassandra Butts, Obama’s classmate at Harvard Law School and a longtime friend, called him “a translator”— someone who could interpret the black experience for white Americans, and the white for black Americans, in the process cultivating a constituency sizable enough to elect a president.

In similar terms, the black politican and civil rights leader John Lewis—who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr—saw Obama as the culmination of the struggle for civil rights. The new president, Lewis said, “is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma,” where civil rights activists were beaten by Alabama police during a march in 1965. And David Remnick, the New Yorker editor, borrowed Lewis’ metaphor for the title of his epic biography on Obama: The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.

Vinod K Jose was the executive editor of The Caravan from 2009 to 2023.

Keywords: china India Afghanistan Iraq Barack Obama Vinod K Jose Cassandra Butts Harvard Law School John Lewis Martin Luther King New Yorker David Remnick TheBridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama National Healthcare Bill World War 2 WTO Kyoto Protocol Copenhagen Africa Burkina Faso
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