Clarence Page: [Bill] Cosby Likes "The [POTUS BARACK] Obama Show".

Cosby likes ‘The Obama Show'
By Clarence Page

Twenty-five years ago NBC took a risk. In late September, the network launched a half-hour situation comedy about a prosperous, well-educated family whose children actually listened to their parents without a lot of wisecracks.

And, oh, by the way, the family also happened to be black. Young people today may have a hard time imagining it, but that was a big deal at the time.

ABC had turned the show down but NBC, which was lagging in the ratings, was a bit more desperate. They won. “The Cosby Show” lasted eight years, five of them as the number-one sit-com in the Nielsen ratings.

Changing times give the show's anniversary special significance as we ponder how much the show helped change our times. The program is often credited with enriching the image of the African-American family in the eyes of the world. I think it also deserves credit for reaffirming the value of the traditional American family unit, regardless of race or ethnicity, although with a more equal-partner role for the wife than used to be the typical case in 1950s sit-coms.

Heathcliff Huxtable was a doctor. Clair Huxtable was a lawyer. I don't recall seeing her in an apron, although it is not hard to imagine Cliff wearing one, if only to offer a visible argument for partnership in a successful marriage.

Before Cosby brought us the Huxtable family, networks had little interest in reviving the too-perfectly idealized strong-dad/omniscient mom/obedient kids format of “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver.” But repackaging those old-school middle-class family set-ups with a middle-class black family sent a reassuring social message that subtly grabbed viewers' hearts: The American Dream was not for whites only.

Cosby sounds less grandiose when talking about his achievement, but no less ambitious. He simply didn't like the sitcoms TV offered.

“It had nothing to do with the color of them — I just didn't like any of them,” he said in a recent interview with the online Web site The Root . “I wanted to take the house back. I felt that on all these other shows the children owned the house. Now in real life, I have five children and (my wife and I) aren't letting people go around the house the way the writers were writing for these kids.”

The show offered a glimpse of the self-help initiatives for which Cosby has more recently crusaded across the country, despite critics — like Georgetown Prof. Michael Eric Dyson, author of Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?) — who complain that he lets structural racism off the hook.

But if Cosby's view is conservative, as Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger with The Atlantic, put it recently, “he's much closer to the conservatism of black nationalism than to the conservatism of Shelby Steele.” He does not reject outside help for the black poor. He does call attention to what blacks at all levels of social need should do to help one another.

It is inevitable that we also wonder how much “The Cosby Show” helped to prepare the way for President Barack Obama's election. Cosby plays that down. “You can't get elected because of somebody you see on TV,” he told The Root. But he was being modest about media power. Since John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard M. Nixon in 1960, no one has gotten elected president without paying due respect to the selling power of TV images.

I think President Obama owes a cultural debt to the Huxtables. What better way for the Obamas to calm voter anxieties than to present the nation with a real-life version of America's most beloved TV family?

I also think the anti-Cosby backlash has been overblown. Having interviewed Cosby several times over the years and witnessed him work the standing-room-only crowds at his call-outs, his rhetoric resonates with the social conservatism of black barbershops, churches and backyard barbecues that looks for allies in the battle against social dysfunction.

In similar fashion, he broadened the vision that we Americans have of ourselves. Amid all of our divisions over other issues, he tapped the fundamental values that most of us share. He reaffirmed the value of nuclear families at time when black Americans in particular were suffering from rising crime, violence, drug addiction and out-of-wedlock births.

Cosby tapped the old-school values that still make up a common culture in our otherwise diverse country. He made mainstream Americans more comfortable with the idea of a black family on their television sets and, eventually in the White House.

Cosby says he enjoys what he calls, “The Obama Show.” He should. He helped to produce it.

Clarence Page is a columnist with the Chicago Tribune. His email address is cpage@tribune.com.