WP: The Steepest Climb
For Black Candidates, the Presidency Has Long Been Out of Reach. In 2008, the Goal Doesn't Seem So Unattainable.
By Kevin Merida
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 27, 2007; C01
Barack Obama has already soared to a place that no black politician has ever reached. He sits on a crest above the vast expanse of the national electorate, not squeezed into a niche, not strapped for cash, a sudden comfortable surprise among the presidential front-runners. They say he caught lightning in a jar. Some say the lightning catcher can win.
Every African American politician who has ever dreamed of leading the country knows how difficult it is to occupy this space. For decades, there has been a rolling conversation in black political circles about who and when and how to run for president. In 2000, President Clinton's former chief adviser on race, Christopher Edley Jr., was asked to speculate about the prospects of a black president by 2020. "I'm pessimistic about that," said Edley, who by then had returned to his Harvard Law School professorship. "I think we will see a woman or Latino before we see an African American."
It wasn't just that Edley had peered over the horizon and taken note of the growing Latino population. Or that he had observed Hillary Clinton up close and could sense her potency. More than anything, Edley knew that the upper echelons of elective office -- particularly the Senate and the governor's mansions, which produce the most viable presidential candidacies -- were "still very segregated territory," as he put it. And he believed that winning the presidency would be tougher for a black politician than for anyone else, so daunting, in fact, that he could not even envision it at the turn of the century.
Edley, now dean of the Boalt Hall law school at the University of California, Berkeley, was reminded last week of his previous assessment. "Wow," he said, followed by a long pause. "I hope it's evidence that I'm a lousy prognosticator, because the evidence now is there is a lot more capacity for hopefulness among the electorate than I had thought."
Obama is a former student of Edley's at Harvard Law, and Edley is now an informal adviser to Obama's campaign -- "a tough thing for me," he says, because he feels close to the Clintons, and his wife, Maria Echaveste, who also was a top official in the Clinton White House, is backing the senator from New York. As for Obama, Edley describes himself as both "giddy" and "a bit wary." "I pinch myself at least once a day, I really do," he says, "because a part of me really believes what I said eight years ago -- that it is fundamentally implausible (for an African American to be president). But day by day, his success is proving me wrong. But I'm almost afraid to believe."...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/26/AR2007122601888_pf.html
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