Second verse, same as the first

Last updated on: January 28, 2010 at 5:19 am by Fred Clark

Second verse, same as the first 2010-01-28T05:19:19-05:00 Fred Clark

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OK, that could have been clearer. Let me take another run at the same idea a bit less elliptically.

I see the parallel between Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama as much closer than all that heady post-election talk of a "post-racial America" seemed to suggest.

Robinson — who wore No. 42 with the Brooklyn Dodgers when he joined the team in 1947 — broke the color barrier in baseball the first time he stepped onto the field, making history in that moment. But that achievement was tenuous and fragile for most of that first year. The backlash was furious and relentless. And it may well have succeeded but for two things: Robinson himself and the rest of his team.

The same is true today for the nation's first black president. And the main reason the backlash against him seems to be gaining the upper hand, I believe, has less to do with his failures than with the failure of the rest of his team to have his back.

And let me make this explicit: The backlash against Obama has been largely indistinguishable from the backlash Jackie Robinson faced. The same motives, the same ugly logic, same tactics and same mob hysteria can be seen today. This is not to say that nothing has changed from 1947 to 2009. We're now talking about the White House instead of Ebbets Field. And the backlashers of today appreciate the need to be a bit more euphemistic. A bit.

But for God's sake just look at them, listen to them — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and their Tea Party flock. Tell me they wouldn't have been right at home in those Cincinnati bleachers in 1947.

Throughout the long campaign and on through his first year in office, Obama has maintained the same cool and restraint that Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey once agreed would be necessary for their revolution to succeed. One could argue that Obama has a freer hand to defend himself, to get visibly angry, to retaliate, but he seems to have judged that his hand isn't that much freer. On this question, the matter of what it requires to be a successful black politician in white America, I'll defer to his judgment.

This restraint has led to an increasing frustration among some of Obama's supporters. After the loss of a mostly unused Democratic supermajority in the Senate and the subsequent stalling of meaningful health care reform, that frustration seems for some to be giving way to panic and despair.

I'm less worried. The Brooklyn Dodgers' great captain, Pee Wee Reese, said of his teammate, "After the two years were up in which he had promised Mr. Rickey that he'd turn the other cheek, he became a guy who would stand up for himself. And he could be a tough bench jockey, and he might plow into a guy who was in his way." I suspect the same will prove true for the president after all that he has had to endure in his rookie year.

And I think that will happen sooner, rather than later, if the rookie president's teammates start doing a better job of watching his back. Sometimes what that requires is an eloquent gesture like Reese's — a silent display of solidarity that exposes the shameful, fundamentally rotten behavior of the backlashers for the hateful, backwards, racist nonsense that it is.

But sometimes it requires something more forcefully confrontational. I can't do better than the way rm put this in comments to the previous post, so let me borrow that here:

The Senate needs to play some fershluggin' hardball and pass things. They keep pretending that 60 or 59 senators is some kind of helpless minority — the important bills are stuck, nominations on hold, all of them acting as if they can't possibly do their jobs, allowing the crazy minority to get away with unprecedented dirty tactics (e.g. the filibuster as routine for every bill). Procedural hardball, parliamentary beat-downs, rhetorical knuckle sandwiches, political head-bashing, ral consequences in response to unacceptable behavior.

And now I realize I've succumbed to the second-lowest form of blogging, the What Those Politicians Really Need To Do Is This post.

I apologize for that. Let me make it up to you by recommending Ira Berkow's wonderful portrait of two Hall-of-Fame Americans, "Standing Beside Jackie Robinson, Reese Helped Change Baseball."

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