I guess it isn’t just Obama supporters, political activists or African American bloggers who have noticed the decidedly hardball tactics of the Clinton campaign. WaPo’s Lois Romano writes today that race is dividing the Democratic Party, which is not exactly the message I think Democrats, liberals and progressives are too thrilled to see the mainstream corporate media pushing during a political campaign to succeed the worst racist administration since — well since I don’t know when.
Race has always been an uncomfortable but inescapable part of America’s political landscape, but not since the 1960s has it been injected into the presidential campaign so early, so fast and so furiously — and by Democrats using it against each other. The strangeness of it goes even further, with the spectacle of black surrogates being deployed by the Clinton camp to lob criticism at a black presidential candidate. Yesterday, surrogates on both sides continued to wage what some see as a unseemly verbal war, and the invective has polarized opinions on all sides of the issue, as always happens when race and political campaigns mix.
Over the years, the politics of race has been seen through many prisms. In modern times, it’s focused on the battle over integration in the 1950s and 1960s, over welfare queens (real or imagined) in the 1976 campaign, and the ugly specter of crime as personified by Willie Horton in the 1988 race.
But never have two candidates so seemingly committed to the same cause taken out after each other — with supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton saying her opponent Sen. Barack Obama is “no Martin Luther King,” as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) did yesterday, and Obama supporters accusing Clinton of race-baiting.
Of course, both sides are doing it in Ms. Romano’s narrative, despite the fact that the issue of race was first raised by Clinton surrogates, including her own husband. It would be unseemly for the Washington Post, home of Lord David Broder, Grand Poohbah of the Beltway Mediatocracy, to say otherwise, I suppose. Still, I don’t see how responses by those in the Obama campaign to racist code words and implicit references to Obama’s past (real or imagined) by Clinton supporters is equivalent. Someone calls me a name, or implies something tawdry about me, I’m going to protest that fact. My response to a personal attack shouldn’t be seen as standing on equal footing with the original character assassination by my antagonist.
But then again this is the Washington DC media, and particularly the Washington Post we are talking about, so what could I expect. It has to be both candidates’ fault that the race card is now in play. God forbid we assign greater blame to one than the other.
The back-and-forth has angered some leaders and scholars of the civil rights community, some of whom are skeptical about the Clinton campaign’s claims that recent comments by Bill and Hillary Clinton or their surrogates have not been orchestrated.
Beyond that, activists and Democrats say it’s offering ammunition to Republicans.
“Every time these people open their mouths and engage race, they are greasing the skids for the Republican Swift-boaters and reminding voters of the Democrats’ indulgence of racial squabbling,” said James Sleeper, a political science professor at Yale who has written extensively on racial politics.
Which is the crux of the matter. Whoever wins the nomination will now be open to Republican attacks. If it is Obama, the GOP will claim that anything they say about his religion, his youth, or his race is no worse than what Senator Clinton’s campaign did back in the primaries. If Clinton is the nominee, expect to hear an endless series of attacks on her for her racist style of campaigning. In short it’s a no win situation for the Democratic Party, one they should never have allowed to happen. Sadly, it’s probably too late now to prevent any further damage to the candidates themselves, and to the party brand in November. And you can bet this will affect other races down ticket, particularly if Senator Clinton wins. Already many African American bloggers are saying that Clinton has lost a lot of support in the the black community. The Republicans won’t need to suppress the black vote all that much if many of them decide to stay home come the Fall because of what is being done to Obama now.
And that would be the real tragedy of the Clinton/Obama race wars.