Loved By Wall St. & Financed By Corporations - What Will Obama Actually Change?

For there are a number of commentators - particularly, but not exclusively, conservatives - who seek to portray Obama not just as a generation removed from Jackson, but the antithesis of everything Jackson stood for. To them his success signals both the failure of "black" politics and the removal of "black" issues from the political arena. As such, his victory does not reshape our analysis of how race is understood in America; it marks a repudiation of the existence of American racism itself.

"The two big losers tonight are probably Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton," said the columnist George Will on election night. "Those who have a sort of investment in the traditional and, I believe, utterly exhausted narrative about race relations in the United States."

On CNN Ronald Reagan's drug tsar, Will Bennett, claimed Obama "has taught the black community you don't have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don't have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues. Great dignity. And this is a breakthrough."

By the time Obama came of age, there was no civil rights movement to emerge from and few union halls to go to. But thanks to the gains of the civil rights era he could attend the nation's best universities (Columbia and Harvard) and get a fantastic job. With no roots in the black politics - the soil was too barren for anything beyond community organising - he emerged from academe. Politically speaking, he was not produced by the black community, but presented to it.

In this respect, Obama shares a great deal with a number of black politicians of his generation who have come to the fore in recent years. Among them are the Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick (Harvard); the Newark mayor, Cory Booker (Yale); the Democratic Leadership Council chair and former Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford Jr (University of Pennsylvania); and the Maryland lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown (Harvard). Obama's trajectory is not the rule; but nowadays it is by no means an exception.