Once again, at the last minute, against the odds, the Clintons’ enemies saved
them. In retrospect, we shouldn’t have been surprised. This is always the
Clinton pattern: nose-diving into certain defeat, only to be rescued by the
overkill of their enemies.
The arrogance of Newt Gingrich, when he became Republican Speaker of the House
of Representatives, served to pull Bill Clinton’s presidency out of a trough
in the 1990s. The prurience of Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who
went into the lurid details of his encounter with Monica Lewinsky, saved
Bill from political oblivion. So last week, the media’s gleeful and very
public expectation of the end of the Clinton dynasty gave the duo one more
life. The voters of New Hampshire realised they had the last chance to keep
the Clinton machine alive – and enough working-class and female Democrats
showed up to do it.
HILLARY had run a very smooth, competent campaign, aiming for a nomination by
acclamation . . . and in the end, it had fallen flat. She campaigned like
Dutch royalty, expecting deference while flaunting her “common touch”.
Everywhere she went, she told people of her “experience” and the
mind-numbing details of her policy proposals. She tried out several personae
and ended up with a perky blow-dried Mother Teresa shtick.
Always ahead in the polls, she smiled beatifically. “Ready From Day One” was
her slogan. She didn’t need Bill any more. She had the micro-trends of Mark
Penn, her pollster, to analyse and an intimidated media to ignore. When she
needed to give her campaign momentum, she ordered a full-court press by
appearing on all five Sunday morning shows. She even tried out a new laugh,
to “humanise” her. Pity it scared small children.
And then something strange happened. In a country that a huge majority
believes is on the wrong track, a message of benign, incumbent, experienced
competence didn’t quite work. In a country exhausted from the toxic
polarisation of the last eight years, reelecting the most divisive
politician in America didn’t seem so brilliant. And once the young and
dynamic Barack Obama proved there was much more to him than mere hype, you
could feel the momentum slipping away. The Clinton Restoration was not, it
turns out, that popular among Democrats.
Her national lead was due in large part to name-recognition and loyalty to her
husband, and when her campaign actually hit the ground, in Iowa, it
underwhelmed. The young saw her as a throwback. African-Americans began to
see the possibility of history being made elsewhere. Independents, never
that fond of Clinton, flocked to Obama. And once the news of Iowa broke, the
media exploded in a frenzy of relief and exuberance. The press has long
disliked the Clintons, especially the controlling, aloof and contemptuous
Hillary.
The thought of her being beaten by a young star was a thrill. The conservative
National Review ran a cover story, “The End of the House of Clinton”.
Newsweek put a saintly photograph of Obama on the cover. Every single media
outlet predicted an Obama landslide in New Hampshire. And then a couple of
teary, downcast photos started making the rounds. Clinton, like all
politicians in a corner, tried everything. In the last debate, she stopped
worrying about being “shrill” and snapped back angrily about her record of
trying to bring change over the years. And in the last 24 hours, the
always-composed, always-perfect Lisa Simpson of the Permanent Campaign
suddenly ceded to an emotional, vulnerable, desperate figure.
Some radio shock-jocks showed up at a rally and yelled “iron my shirt!” at
her. “Oh, the remnants of sexism are alive and well,” Mrs Clinton said,
asking for the lights to be turned up on the pranksters. In a now-famous
campaign slip, the canned laugh faded to an almost spontaneous crack in the
throat – not a cry, just the hint of a cry. On the day of the primary, the
vintage feminist Gloria Steinem declared Clinton the victim of sexist
double-standards. Hillary’s slogan, “Ready From Day One” – after swiftly
morphing into “Ready For Change” to ape Obama’s rallying cry – suddenly
became the equivalent of “I Am Weak. I Am Vincible. I Am Woman!” And
women, mainly working-class, middle-aged women who in their lives may have
seen younger, less experienced men promoted over more experienced women –
women who identified with Clinton’s harried, multi-tasked desperation on the
trail – shocked the pollsters and came out to vote. And so she lived to see
another political morning.
The first serious female candidate for president was forced to play the female
sympathy card to stay in the race. Thatcher would have died rather than do
such a thing. Ditto Merkel. But Clinton has never claimed to be above
anything. She is now the candidate of change, having discovered that that is
the message that resonates. She has padded her record to be able to be both
the pro-war candidate if the surge keeps its tactical success and the
antiwar candidate if Iraq’s civil war reignites.
For good measure, her surrogates had tried to keep the association of Obama
and cocaine in the air; and some volunteers were caught passing around
Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mails. I have no doubt that more mud on Obama will
emerge from the Clinton camp. In the last week in Iowa, Hillary also got her
husband and long-time political partner to go out aggressively on the trail
for her. He in turn used his former office and party clout to trash Obama as
a “kid”, his candidacy as a “roll of the dice” and his campaign promise of
hope a “fairy tale”.
As Maureen Dowd, the columnist, pointed out, the man from Hope ended up
campaigning against hope. You do what you gotta do. It would be easy to get
high-minded about this, but American politics is very hard to disentangle
from the web of identity – racial, sexual, religious, regional – that
distinguishes some Americans from others. As the first serious female
contender for president, it is not surprising that Clinton would at some
point resort to an appeal based on her gender. It’s just that few predicted
it would happen this crudely, this desperately and this soon.
WHAT’S more surprising is how carefully Obama himself has avoided any direct
racial appeals.
Although he doesn’t shy from his racial background, and sees it as integral to
his personal identity, he has not campaigned as a black candidate, or
explicitly called on his fellow African-Americans to support him on those
grounds. He represents a new generation of black politicians.
They are not angry identity-mongers like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Nor are
they conservative black leaders who refuse to engage with race or identify
with much of the black community – like Clarence Thomas, the supreme court
justice, or Shelby Steele, the academic and author.
They are both black candidates and postblack candidates. The governor of
Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is one such. Obama has pioneered a different
kind of politics – past the toxicities of the 1990s into a more hopeful and
unifying message. In other words, Obama has yet to play the victim, as
Clinton has. He is an Oprah candidate, showcasing African-American
opportunity as much as African-American identity. He rebutted some of the
Clinton team’s attempts to link him with selling cocaine – but not by
instantly crying racism. He hasn’t framed a message to black voters alone.
Even when speaking to overwhelmingly black crowds, he always pitches his
message to all races. He is more Dr Martin Luther King than Malcolm X. Even
when he lagged behind Clinton by a large margin among African-American
voters, he never played the race card to claw any back. He knew that his
main problem was that black voters simply didn’t believe that a black man
could ever overcome racism sufficiently to become president. And Obama’s
strategy in countering that was to show, not tell. He believed that if he
was able to win Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state, with a unifying
message, that in itself would prove to black voters that he was viable
nationally.
It worked beautifully. And the day after Iowa, you could feel a sea-change in
African-American feeling and thinking. The polls in predominantly black
South Carolina swung dramatically in his favour. But as soon as a black
candidate gets this kind of critical mass, reaction is bound to follow. Some
serious pollsters believe that Clinton’s surprise victory in New Hampshire
may have had something to do with white voters suddenly panicking in the
face of a black frontrunner. Obama, to his credit, has carefully avoided any
such inference.
The minute he starts relying on racial excuses, the unique nature of his
candidacy evaporates. But the racial question doesn’t just hurt Obama. In
some ways, it helps him. In fact, it may be that race will now come to his
rescue just as gender just did for Clinton.
SURPRISINGLY, the Clintons and their allies have done a lot of the work for
him. Hillary’s citing Obama’s own acknowledged use of cocaine in the past
seemed racially loaded to some. And Bill used loaded language in New
Hampshire when he referred to Obama as a “kid”.
White Southerners who use terms for children about black men raise hackles
among African-Americans. They hear the emasculating word “boy” that was used
for so long on so many plantations. Donna Brazile, a black Democratic
operative and former Al Gore campaign manager, commented: “For him to go
after Obama using ‘fairy tale’, calling him a ‘kid’, as he did last week,
it’s an insult. And I tell you, as an African- American, I find his words
and his tone to be very depressing.”
Another critical leader among Afri- can-Americans in South Carolina,
Congressman James Clyburn, also voiced concern after Hillary tried to attack
the resonances that Obama has drawn with Martin Luther King.
In the final days of the New Hampshire campaign, she said: “Dr King’s dream
began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”
She was trying to argue that if Obama was King, she was Johnson. Not a good
move. Clyburn told The New York Times on Friday: “We have to be very, very
careful about how we speak about that era in American politics. 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.”
He was also offended by the condescending tone of the former president: “To
call [King’s] dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing,
could very well be insulting to some of us.”
Obama’s viability has raised serious hopes among black Americans – emotions
not felt for a very long time. For the Clintons to defuse this without
appearing to be dashing black aspirations is not an easy task.
They have built a very deep bond with African-Americans over the years, Bill
especially. But they have never been in competition with a black politician
before. To some black observers, it seems as if some liberal support for
black candidates stops when those black candidates really do become an equal
and a threat.
“The sense of entitlement reeked from Clinton during the Charlie Rose
interview,” wrote one black blogger recently about an angry appearance by
Bill Clinton on public television. “And, that is exactly why he, and his
wife, need to be sent packing . . . This is as nice as I can be. There was
another undercurrent in that interview, but maybe I’m too ‘sensitive’ as a
Black person and picked up on it. If any other Black folk saw the interview,
maybe they’ll tell me if they picked up on the undercurrent too . . .”
AND so Obama’s enemies may do for him in the next week or so what Clinton’s
enemies have done for her. Remember: this is still a Democratic primary
race, and minority voters have disproportionate clout, especially in the
South and Southwest.
So far, Obama has not played the race card, as Clinton has the gender. But
that is because it is not in his nature, and because he is still, despite
this week’s buzz, in a stronger position than the former first lady.
He has strong financing and a powerful organisation in the next caucus in
Nevada, where he just received the endorsement of the influential Culinary
Workers Union. In South Carolina, the next significant primary, he has seen
a wave of black support in the wake of Iowa.
Two, it seems, can play political jujitsu. And in the roiling, unpredictable
waters of identity politics, race may yet trump gender in the end.
