Who Would Benefit the Most?
The Obama ancestry story has been flying all over the blogosphere. On the off chance that you haven’t heard about it yet, here it is straight from the Baltimore Sun (via Jules Crittenden):
Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.
[…]
But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: It appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and census records.
[…]
The records - which had never been addressed publicly by the Illinois senator or his relatives - were first noted in an ancestry report compiled by William Addams Reitwiesner, who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time. The report, on Reitwiesner’s Web site, carries a disclaimer that it is a “first draft” - one likely to be examined more closely if Obama is nominated.
[…]
According to the research, one of Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.
[…]
The Sun retraced much of Reitwiesner’s work, using census information available on the Web site ancestry.com and documents retrieved by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, among other sources. The records show that Overall, then 30, owned a 15-year-old black female and a 25-year-old black male, while Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black man and a 58-year-old black woman. (Slaves are listed in the 1850 census by owner, age, “sex,” and “colour,” not by name.)
(What’s up with the British spelling of color, I wonder? Do folks in Baltimore still consider themselves to be loyalists?)
Anyway, the Sun article is interesting, to say the least. Here’s the relevant data directly from Mr. Reitwiesner’s Web site:
I did some link hopping through blogs yesterday evening to see what people were saying, and found pretty much what I expected. A sample from the aforementioned Crittenden post:
If you could take that slave thing far back enough, I bet you’d find that not only do you have a lot of odd family relationships on this side of the pond, but there are probably some people who are descended from the same West Africans who sold their other West African ancestors into slavery.
[…]
History is a bitch that way. But this is a fascinating new development in American politics … looking centuries back for any hint of hypocrisy or scandal.
[…]
I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how well I’d fare. You never know what you’ll find when you climb back up the family tree. I’m sure all my good readers are descended from the great kings of Ireland, Norman gentry, pharaohs, whatever you like.
[…]
Genealogy is a dodgy game at best. No matter how good your documents are, as a friend of mine once put it, the odds that someone jumped over the back fence and your last name isn’t what you think it is go up with each generation. (Emphasis added.)
The responses to the Sun article range in tenor from clinical observations (such as Crittenden’s) to expressions of moral outrage (of which there were many). How dare they try to derail Obama’s campaign based on an ancestral history over which the good Senator has absolutely no control? It’s an outrage, I tell you. Character assassination!
Then, of course, I found one good fellow at The Populist Moderate who opined “that the Slash and Burn Agenda of the Right Wing Republican press has gone to a new low.” Hmmmm.
All moralizing aside, what I’m really interested in is: Who would gain the most from having this sort of information disseminated? Certainly not the Republican Party or any of its candidates, that’s for sure. All you have to do is take a look at the most recent Zogby poll to understand what I mean:
Among those who said they would vote in the Democratic primary or caucus for President, Clinton leads with 33% support, up 4% from our last telephone survey in early January. However, Obama has made dramatic gains in the last six weeks, moving from 14% support to 25% backing. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is a distant third, winning 12% support. One in five said they were undecided about which Democratic candidate to support. (Emphasis added.)
So “Obama has made dramatic gains in the last six weeks,” eh? It would be a patently stupid thing, then, for the Republican Party to trash Obama right at the point when his candidacy is showing a surge in support—a direct violation of the concept of “divide and conquer.” No. It wasn’t the Republicans who did this….
Inline poll:
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
So I started to wonder what might motivate the Baltimore Sun to publish the article. I’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about the paper, but the story had my curiosity piqued last night so I did a little cursory detective work. I wanted to know if the paper had a history of any sort of political bias. Lo and behold, I discovered the following information:
In 2000, the Baltimore Sun endorsed Al Gore for president. In 2004, the paper endorsed John Kerry.
And this begs the question: Who would be the logical heir to this legacy of preference for liberal presidential candidates? Which candidate would the Baltimore Sun be more likely to support in 2008 (barring any sort of startling ideological conversion)?
Who most wants African-Americans to believe, as Debra J. Dickerson so bluntly put it, that “Obama isn’t black”? Who would benefit the most by having this sort of information released? Who’s pissed off enough to want it released? Who’s “ruthless” enough to arrange for its release? And who’s powerful enough…?
Most importantly, who’s nervous enough?
I wonder.
Update: Republicanpundit at Hang Right Politics senses the same dark hand that I do.
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