Hillary Clinton's quest to piss off everybody

Her latest inflammatory comments:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Now, in a primary race against the first serious black nominee ever, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. I don't think there was intentional malice here--I don't think she was making some kind of political calculation to be racially divisive--but I do think that she has got it into her head that, somehow, in making this kind of observation she is simply being a political realist, and that the thought of her being racist in any way is so laughable that no one would ever think of calling it racially divisive. And so she goes ahead and says it.

But in doing so, she's pissing everybody off. For example, she's certainly got Bob Herbert's hackles in the 12 o'clock position:

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

...

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

The crazy thing about it is, I'm sure the Clintons are so steeped in their perception of themselves that they'll fail to see how opinions like Herbert's have a legitimate basis. They'll probably come to the conclusion that Obama supporters are playing the race card on them, accusing the Obama campaign of turning a non-racist comment into a semi-racist one.

And none of this does the Democratic Party any good whatsoever.

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.

"We've actually read the complete sound bite"

Fox News reporter Chris Wallace looks like an adult amongst children in this clip, where he criticizes the smiley-faced pundits of Fox and Friends for willfully misinterpreting recent comments made by Obama on race:



I especially like the blond guy's whining about how he read the whole sound bite. What does he want, a cookie? How about reacting to whole interviews instead of sound bites, so that you can say something interesting instead of being an unthinking wall in the Fox echo chamber?

I was surprised at just how scandalized the Fox and Friends gang looked as "one of their own" dared to take them to task on live television (the quick triple reaction shot of the gang at 0:25 is priceless). Their reaction also seemed very unprofessional to me--from the one pundit's passive-aggressive thanking of Chris Wallace for raising the objection on the air instead of via private email, to their childish pouting at the end of the interview and repeated compliment-baiting (does this mean you--*sniff*--don't like us anymore, Mr. Wallace?).

Ugh. Get better pundits, Fox--these people are clearly ninnies, and they're not doing the conservative cause any good.

Mike Huckabee: a decent man

Barack Obama is not the only politician willing to raise the level of discourse in America. Watch how Mike Huckabee, with simple earnestness and empathy, completely shuts down Joe Scarborough and his partisan baiting (you can skip to 3:30). It's not just anyone that can reduce a loudmouth partisan hack like Scarborough to lame Atticus Finch quotes in the space of a single response:



I found his brief description of his personal experience with segregation--and plea to "cut some slack" to those who have suffered from it--to be actually, well, touching.

It is also worthwhile to take notice of Huckabee's exceptional ear for politics and ability to maneuver in the political moment. While most conservatives respond with shrill, tone-deaf, knee-jerk reactions to Obama's speech that still just obsess over Reverend Wright's vitriol, Huckabee tacks toward conciliation--and is even able to wring a valid criticism of liberals out of it.

I don't mean this to be an accusation of cynicism on the part of Huckabee. I think this is one of those instances where being sincere just is politically savvy.

Obama's speech on race: a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water

Some weeks ago I went and saw Helvetica, which is a documentary all about the history of the ubiquitous font, its significance in design, and its impact on culture. One of the people interviewed--graphic designer Michael Bierut--gives this memorable description of what it must have been like when the streamlined, modernist font came on the scene in the 1960s:

You go to a corporate identity consultant, circa 1965-1966 and they would take that and lay it here and say, "Here's your current stationary, and all it implies, and this is what we're proposing." And next to that, next to the belching smoke-stacks, and the nuptial script, and the ivory paper, they'd have a crisp bright white piece of paper, and instead of "Amalgamated Widget, founded 1857" it'd just say "WidgeCo" in Helvetica Medium.

Can you imagine how bracing and thrilling that was? It must have felt like you had crawled through a desert with your mouth just caked with filthy dust, and someone offered you a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water... It must have been just fantastic. (Hat tip: some guy Russell Beattie)

This quote is what came to mind when I read and watched Barack Obama's recent "major speech on race" (text; unnecessarily interactive Flash movie). For eight long years--and arguably, although to a more tolerable degree, the eight years before that as well--I've been fed nothing but the most intelligence-insulting, deliberately-repetitive, simplistic, lowest-common-denominator, platitude-laden, poll-tested, calculated, take-no-chances, sound-byte-friendly, made-for-TV, unnuanced, uninteresting, uninspired, unoriginal, committeed-to-death, unprincipled, unthoughtful, anti-intellectual, cynical, bromide-filled, conventional-wisdom-repeating, intellectually dishonest political rhetoric imaginable.

To be fair, Obama's speech is not entirely devoid of these trappings of TV-era American political rhetoric. For example, more than once he slides into the lazy populist habit of corporation-blaming ("...[T]he real problem is...that the corporation you work for will ship [your job] overseas for nothing more than a profit"). But despite this, the speech does succeed in grappling with lots of complexities and ambiguities in race--observing legitimate resentments felt by both blacks and whites, for example, and condemning but ultimately embracing the imperfect Reverend Wright. And this puts it head and shoulders above all others in terms of sheer level of discourse--in terms, in other words, of how it addresses its audience: as intelligent, discerning adults.

It is in this way that Obama's speech is, to me, "a clear, refreshing, distilled, icy glass of water".

Of course, I realize that I am commenting here more on the rhetoric of the speech than the actual substance of it. But I think this is appropriate. What makes the speech stand out isn't the novelty of its content, per se, but the circumstances in which it was uttered: by a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, in a major, nationally televised address.

Complex, sober, and enlightening conversations on race and other issues have been out there for some time--in living rooms, between close friends, in academic circles--but they've been hard to find. One of the major projects of Obama's candidacy has been to bring them into the national discourse. This has not been easy. The 24-hour-news cycle, the news networks, the Clinton campaign, and the horse-race-obsessed punditry have made it difficult at times, even impossible to properly argue or explain anything in depth. Even now they are doing their best to reduce Obama's thoughtful and cohesive 40-minute argument into a meaningless media shrapnel of sound-bytes, "gaffes", and speculation as to whether he is "sending a message" to one demographic or another.

But internet--that vanquisher of the fascist, one-to-many fiend of the 20th century known by its sinister monogram "T.V."--is strong like ox. At nytimes.com, the full text of Obama's speech is the most emailed item. The video of the speech in its entirety is the number one video on You Tube. The force that propelled Obama's candidacy and financed his campaign is the same one that is presenting his case, unfiltered and unreconstructed, to the American electorate.

I wonder if they are as thirsty as I am.

Ferraro's comments an insult to the art of politics

Geraldine Ferraro, one-time Democratic VP candidate, has quit her post in the Clinton campaign because of a minor media firestorm over these comments:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Of course, many people's first reaction is to denounce the comments as racist--but this is the wrong view. Matt Yglesias nails it:

It really is hard to imagine Obama being where he is today if he weren't black. But the point is that everyone who has success in presidential politics does so, in part, because of contingent personal attributes that aren't a strict form of merit. Being white has, after all, been an important part of the political success of all our previous presidents. Certainly Bill Clinton's southern accent was an important part of his package, as it was for Jimmy Carter and of course Lyndon Johnson was made VP to do regional ticket balancing. John Kennedy had a rich dad. Franklin Roosevelt was named "Roosevelt." That's just political reality, not some vast black conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton down.

...And, of course, there's no way Hillary Clinton would be where she is if she weren't a certain ex-president's wife.

Ferraro's observation wasn't untrue or racist so much as trivial. However, that said, I think that every politician in the Clinton campaign should know by now that any comment involving Obama and race is going to be a media powder keg, and must be handled very delicately. Ferraro, with her careless and easy-to-misconstrue comments, was negligent in this regard. BOOM!