EDITORIALS : Oh, please
Posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2008
POLITICS is like life, at least in this respect: It has no end of surprises.
These days a Republican can get elected governor of Massachusetts and an honest reformer governor of Louisiana. Presidents can be born and reared in Arkansas. This political season, a candidate for president actually pulled a negative ad. Wow. Heck, one guy running in the GOP primaries this time around is pro-choice when it comes to abortion. What next—a pro-life Democrat ? But just when we thought we’d seen it all.... The Clintons using the race card ? You might be forgiven for thinking as much if you were surfing the web over the weekend. A newspaper in South Carolina mentions the allegation, and the next thing you know, Juan Williams is on Fox News shouting it to the world. Oh, please.
Say what you will about Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Lord knows we do often enough, but accusing them of dividing their party by using the race card against young comer Barack Obama ? We’re speechless. Well, almost.
Has there been a more ridiculous accusation yet in this political cycle ? Let’s see.... The floating cross in the background of that Mike Huckabee commercial in Iowa.... The accusation that Hillary Clinton turned on the water works to gain votes.... The never-ending email that claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim....
Nope. Nothing’s been more ridiculous. So far.
How do these things get started ? Well, combine a 24-hour news cycle that has a lot of dead air to fill (the old test pattern would be a step up ) with the all too understandable suspicion of anything Clintonesque and soon a lot of non-stories are going to make the news. Especially in an election year. Consider New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, dares to use the phrase “shuck and jive” while discussing the campaign. Bill Clinton, saying the press isn’t tough enough on his wife’s opponent, calls some idea of Barack Obama’s a fairy tale and is accused of using a racist tactic. And in a remarkably tin-eared attempt to counter the appeal of Barack Obama’s bright and shiny rhetoric, the candidate herself notes that it took an experienced politician in the White House—Lyndon Johnson—to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, rather than just Martin Luther King’s oratory. As if words themselves do not constitute a kind of moral imperative. See Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, or how an Englishman named Churchill mobilized the majesty of the English language itself against the Nazi war machine—with triumphant results.
Mrs. / Senator / Heir Apparent Clinton spent the rest of the week trying to explain / defend / whine about how she’d been misunderstood. Yes, she’d made a tactical error in courting the voters, especially those of us to whom Martin Luther King Jr. has become an historical icon, but playing the race card this wasn’t. What it was, was dumb, insensitive and unfeeling—not so much to Dr. King as to the power of words.
Can anyone with a feel for historyand poetry—conceive of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 without the March on Washington the year before, and Martin Luther King’s magnificent words on that occasion, and not just on that occasion ?
Barack Obama’s great strength in this campaign is his bright promise; his great weakness is his absence of experience, of any real record to back up that sleek promise. Hillary Clinton’s great strength in this campaign is her years of experience in the mechanics of politics (for good or ill ), but she seems to offer nothing more than the most pedestrian of ideas and rhetoric. She’s about as visionary as a Madeleine Albright or—if anyone remembers him—Warren Christopher. The presidency of the United States ought to be more than a mechanic’s job. It’s supposed to be a bully pulpit, too, remember ? Great presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan understood that.
THE RECORD of the Clinton presidency was, shall we say, mixed.
It had its ups and downs, like any presidency. But racist ? Even the Clintons’ most adamant detractors would have a tough time making that argument. Which doesn’t mean some folks won’t try. Like a powerful congressman from South Carolina named Jim Clyburn. To quote the distinguished honorable: “It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.” Our considered editorial opinion: Sir, get over it. Politics ain’t beanbag. Besides, just who is denigrating whose motives here ? Hillary Clinton is no more playing the race card than, well, Barack Obama is. Each is just trying to edge out the other for a high political office in a political tradition as old as American politics.
Americans are always demanding a leader who’ll talk straight to us. But when one tries, she’s blown out of the water. The moral of the story: If a politician is going to tell it to us with the bark off, he’d better not use the colloquial phrase “shuck and jive,” colorful and fitting as it may be. Whatever the great American public may say, we may really prefer meaningless language to the kind of candid discourse that’s meaningful enough to risk offending some super-sensitive soul somewhere—or who pretends to be. We’ve had experience ourselves along those lines. We’ve already been told we can’t use the word Coonass in discussing Louisiana politics. Or the word niggardly in front of those who don’t know what it means. And when a slim majority seizes control of Little Rock’s school board and proceeds to make a very costly shambles of the administration of public education in the state’s largest school district, they must never, never be referred to as the Gang of Four, especially when they’ve been acting like it.
Personally, we’d prefer leveling with our readers—which is what an editorial page is supposed to do—but we have the great advantage of not having to run for political office. And running for president of the United States must be the most demeaning trial of all.
The Democratic Party has a choice to make in this election. How make that choice if one contender doesn’t dare criticize the other as best she can ? Or has to walk on eggshells lest she actually tell the voters what she thinks ? Here’s what we think: Racial equality will have been achieved in this country when a black candidate for president, or for anything else, can be criticized with the same verve as a white candidate.
Conclusion: If the Clintons are using the race card to divide the very party they hope to lead (again ), we’ll eat our big, ugly Arkansas Razorback hats. Tag and all.
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