Political Animal

Hillary Clinton has decided to personally weigh in on the Obama-Wright controversy:

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that.... I think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

What is interesting to me about this is the equivalence it strikes between Clinton's relation to Don Imus and Obama's relation to his pastor. In the first instance, you have two publicly-facing figures--Clinton and Imus--who are strangers to each other and yet both occupy a spot on the broad stage of American politics. Their interaction with each other was nothing more than part of the strange kabuki that invariably plays out whenever anyone runs afoul of the (sometimes arbitrary but mostly useful) rhetorical boundaries that separate racist from non-racist speech. Even despite the fact that no one seriously believed that Don Imus was actually a racist--and even though the women who were the target of his unfortunate "nappy headed hos" remark publicly forgave him for the mistake--a long line of unrelated public figures, including Clinton, went on television to "speak out" against Imus and say all sorts of obligatory things meant to send signals of support to those whose political power is expressed, in part, by universal recognition of and adherence to the boundaries that delineate acceptable political rhetoric on race. And, though doing this may have been unfair to Imus on a personal level insofar as it too-quickly castigated him as a racist, there was a political justification for it because it reinforced, re-validated, and re-legitimized the rhetorical boundaries that signify America's rejection of racism. So Clinton subjugated the personal to the political in dealing with Imus' gaffe; but this followed naturally from the fact that Clinton only had a political, and not personal, relationship with Imus.

Obama is in a different kind of bind because the unacceptable remarks were made not by a stranger who shares the national political stage, but a dear friend, mentor, and spiritual guide. If Obama were to "speak out" against Wright and sever ties with him--as Clinton seems to suggest Obama ought to do--he would, at least according to the rhetorical logic of American politics, be "sending a strong message" that no racist speech ought to go unpunished, and would thereby reinforce the legitimacy of America's stand against racism. However, it would also come at a great cost to Obama personally: he would be throwing someone he cares about under the bus, and compromising his integrity in the process. Obama's response was to try his best to have it both ways: while at the same time doing right by his pastor and defending him as a good man who sometimes says inflammatory things, he defused the rhetorical implications of not categorically denouncing him in front of the nation by explicitly addressing race in a major speech. This attempt to have it both ways was risky for Obama because it required Americans--and the media--to hear the speech as something meant to engage them directly and explicitly on race, rather than indirectly through rhetorical code geared primarily toward media consumption and echo-chambering. It is not clear if Obama was completely successful in this, but the fact that his campaign has not entirely collapsed suggests that he was at least successful enough.

Obama's demonstrated ability to survive politically without sacrificing his personal sense of decency puts Clinton's reputation for cut-throat politics into sharp relief. Consider David Brooks' recent devastating assessment of Clinton as some kind of relentless political beast:

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

I have always thought these judgments of Clinton to be unfair; they describe any and every politician, Obama included. But the reason why Clinton gets this reputation and Obama instead gets dubbed "authentic" is not because one is calculating and the other is not, but because one is making a different calculation than the other. While Obama has attempted to bypass the often stifling limitations of conventional political rhetoric to good effect--admitting drug use, conceding that some ideas from opposing ideologies are worthwhile--Clinton has waged political war from firmly within its confines. Such a strategy must have appeared low-risk to her in the short-run; but over time, it has earned her the reputation of soulless, inhuman political animal.