Letters to the Editor
Majorajam
Published Letters: 275 Editor's Choice: 11
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@AKA Smith
[Read the article: Clinton: Wright "would not have been my pastor"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know if you're still looking at this thread or not, but I figured I'd give a short reply in case you were.
Firstly, you say that Obama needs to come to the middle, etc. and that he can't do that without losing his black support. I don't agree with the second part, and think the first part will come as night (the general) follows day (the primaries). Specifically with regards to the first part, I think Obama could have and still can kick Reverend Wright to the curb and not lose one black vote. If Bill Clinton can get 90 some odd % of black votes after Sister Soulja, a viable black candidate for President no doubt would too (and that moment could still come, over Wright or on some other matter to assure white voters that he won't let crazy black folk run the show. ehem.). Obama's supporters of all stripes want first and foremost to win. That reality is not lost on the Senator or his campaign. So, why didn't he? Well, we don't know. If you like to believe in his sincerity, he explained it in his speech: "Some people have asked why I stayed in the church... I can no more disown Reverend Wright..., etc.". If you aren't willing to ascribe sincerity there, then you could certainly point out that Obama doesn't think voters will buy the idea that he has just had an epiphany, coincidentally timed with all the sanctimonious outrage from the right wing and Hillary supporters, that Wright is a hate-monger and that he has left TUCC, etc. etc. If that's the case, call me a buyer of the wisdom of whomever on the campaign team pushed it. So, I think we have a fairly comprehensive explanation of why the Obama camp has reacted how it has.
The next bit in your response was the race card issue, and I think it's a little off topic, but as you might expect, I can't let that one slip. I think the confusion over this allegation accounts to some degree for why the two sets of partisans see it so differently. We know where the story starts- in New Hampshire. New Hampshire had the 'fairy tale' and the MLK/LBJ comparison etc. Jesse Jackson's remarks came well after. Now, many people, rightly or wrongly, took the remarks by the two Clintons (MLK-LBJ, 'fairy-tale'), as having racial overtones. This was due in large part to the attendant circumstances; namely, coming as it did after a number of racially tinged, and in some cases, outrageous attacks from Clinton surrogates- Kerry with the madrassa comment, the NH campaign chair suggesting that Obama was a drug dealer, Mark Penn blurting out 'cocaine' in an interview, and Andrew Cuomo's, 'you can't just shuck and jive your way to the nomination'. All of this was the backdrop against which the comments by the candidate and her husband caused an uproar amongst Obama supporters and many at-the-time neutral observers (remembering that Obama's support was half then what is now).
It has to be pointed out that this outrage was in no way remotely coordinated or spun by anyone in the Obama camp, any more than the Wright outrage has been coordinated or spun by the Clintons until recently. There was no therefore no race card played on their part, even if the Clintons felt the racial accusations to be baseless. For example, you can hardly argue that the pro-Hillary New York Times editorial board was taking orders from the Obama camp to toss the race card at the Clintons, but this is what they had to say the day after Hillary won New Hampshire:
Mrs. Clinton ran an angry campaign in New Hampshire, and... won narrowly, but came perilously close to injecting racial tension...
In the days before the voting, Mrs. Clinton and her team were so intent on talking about how big a change a woman president would be — and it surely would — that some of her surrogates even suggested that it would be a more valuable change than an African-American president... She complimented Dr. King’s soaring rhetoric, but said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. ”
...It was hard to escape the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change. She pulled herself back from the brink by later talking about the mistreatment and danger Dr. King faced. Former President Bill Clinton, who seems to forget he is not the one running, hurled himself over the edge on Monday with a bizarre and rambling attack on Mr. Obama...
So it's pretty clear that amongst both neutral observers and partisans, suspicions were running high that the Hillary camp had consciously played the race card before the first Obama camp move to advance that narrative- a memo from a low-level campaign worker in South Carolina. And, of course, that was where the whole cycle of accusation and counter-accusation, of parsing every statement and maneuver to make it fit the narrative, began. It's also where increasing grievance starts to push the subtlety out of the equation and you get Jesse Jackson with the Katrina remarks, and Bill Clinton comparing Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson (why not, say, Edwards?), etc. and everyone becomes cause and consequence of a media circus.
So I don't agree with your characterization of this race card business, which, though not necessarily less accurate than how many on my side would have it, is still wrong. We may not know the extent to which either of the two campaigns pushed a race card agenda with all these comments, or when, but we do know that the original provocation- planned or not- came from a series of comments by Clinton surrogates. And I don't think that's disputable...