Obama's Achilles Heel

Obama has a typical politician's problem, one especially prevalent in those who come from the legislature and try to go to the executive. That problem is the fact that he has to be sufficiently appealing to his base constituency to be elected to the legislature while he's running for the legislature. This leads him to do the traditional "things" that a legislator from his district or section of the country does. Then, when he tries to appeal to a national base, he finds that the local positions and rhetoric which once got him elected have now come back to haunt him.

In Obama's case, his was a Harvard-Princeton black family, and he ran for legislature among people who didn't relate to such a privileged upbringing. To combat that potential vote-killer, he chose to adopt the angry rhetoric of some people in the black community. Hence, he takes a pilgrimage to a known black terrorist in his district. He attends Jeremiah Wright's church. He chooses to be around the angry blacks; people more in the line of Malcom X than Martin Luther King, Jr. For many years, Obamba has been exceedingly comfortable in the more militant half of the black political scene.

Now, he's running on a broader stage, where not only does most of his audience not share his angry black views; they don't understand them. They feel threatened by them. They are aghast when Obama's preacher spews what is basically nonsense about whites and the government. They don't relate to the anger coming from the pulpit, and are tempted to respond in kind. There does not seem to be much room on the national stage for this militant black political view, simply because it is so foreign to most Americans.

So Obama finds himself in a most unenviable place. He must appeal to the national base, yet he must not disavow his home-town crowd. Unfortunately for Obama, that home-town crowd simply is not representative of most Americans. Unless he is more successful at distancing himself from them, he will not succeed. His past success at being comfortable among militant blacks may undo his very real chance of success on the national stage. Obama may be his own Achilles heel.