Bill “AWATT” Kristol has a thing called “Desperate Husband” where he says Bill Clinton has been playing the race card, and doing so clumsily. Roger Cohen’s column is titled “Obama’s Youth-Driven Movement” and he says this election is about the past versus the future, not black versus white. Mr. Krugman has written a cautionary tale about the “Lessons of 1992.” His question is has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election? Here’s AWATT:
In the run-up to Saturday’s South Carolina primary, Bill Clinton repeatedly denounced racial divisions in American politics. Indeed, he said Friday in Spartanburg, Americans are “literally aching to live in a post-racial future.”
But Clinton certainly hasn’t been hastening that day. Quite the contrary. In Charleston, on Wednesday, he disingenuously remarked: “As far as I can tell, neither Senator Obama nor Hillary have lost votes because of their race or gender. They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender — that’s why people tell me Hillary doesn’t have a chance of winning here.”
Really? Who was telling him that?
Hillary was ahead in South Carolina polls as recently as early December. And in fact, women made up 61 percent of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina, blacks 55 percent. If Obama was getting votes because of race and Hillary because of gender, Hillary had a perfectly good chance to win. Bill Clinton’s excuse is unconvincing and unseemly.
Then on Saturday, in Columbia, pre-spinning his wife’s imminent defeat, Clinton reminded reporters out of the blue that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88. And he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here. He’s run a good campaign everywhere.”
What do Jesse Jackson’s victories two decades ago have to do with this year’s Obama-Clinton race? The Obama campaign is nothing like Jackson’s. Obama isn’t running on Jackson-like themes. Obama rarely refers to Jackson.
Clinton’s comment alludes to one thing, and to one thing only: Jackson and Obama are both black candidates. The silent premise of Clinton’s comment is that Obama’s victory in South Carolina doesn’t really count. Or, at least, Clinton is suggesting, it doesn’t mean any more than Jackson’s did.
But of course — as Clinton knows very well — Jesse Jackson didn’t win (almost all-white) Iowa. He didn’t come within a couple of points of prevailing in (almost all-white) New Hampshire. Nor did he, as Obama did, carry white voters in rural Nevada. And Saturday, in South Carolina, even after Bill Clinton tried to turn Obama into Jackson, Hillary defeated Obama by just three to two among white voters
So Bill Clinton has been playing the race card, and doing so clumsily. But why is he playing any cards? He wasn’t supposed to be in the game. But just as Hillary was supposed to be finding her own voice, Bill decided to barge in, and to do so with a vengeance. This has been no favor to Hillary.
The proof is in the South Carolina results. Bill Clinton became the dominant story in the last few days of that campaign. According to the exit polls, about one in five South Carolina Democrats decided whom to vote for in the last three days. Among those late deciders, Hillary Clinton received only 21 percent of the vote compared with 27 percent overall. In South Carolina, many of those falling off from Clinton seemed to go to Edwards. Next week, with Edwards much less of a factor, won’t many such voters go all the way to Obama?
Right now, Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls in almost all the big states voting. She is a tough and capable campaigner, and she may be able to hold on to those leads. But it is now clear that putting her in the White House brings a hyperactive Bill back in with her. Who needs it? Liberals and Democrats can get basically the same policies without the Clinton baggage, and in choosing Obama, they can nominate a more electable candidate.
So Hillary’s advantage in the polls will, I suspect, erode. The erosion could be hastened by the expected endorsement of Obama by Ted Kennedy on Monday. It could be helped further along if Al Gore hops aboard the Obama bandwagon later in the week. Meanwhile, Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader during most of the Clinton presidency, is actively supporting Obama. Talk to Democrats in D.C., and it’s amazing how many who know the Clintons well — many of whom worked in the Clinton administration — are eager that they not return to the White House.
This week, the Clinton team will dump every bit of opposition research it has on Obama. We’ll see how Obama responds.
But the moment of truth could come at the Democratic debate Thursday, in Los Angeles. Edwards may have dropped out by then. If so, it will be a one-on-one showdown. Even if he’s there, he’ll be effectively a bystander. Will Obama hold his own?
I’d say that even if you’ve (understandably) skipped the previous debates, this is one to tune into. I had a dinner scheduled Thursday night. I’m canceling it. The Giants probably won’t beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl. But this could be the week Obama upsets the Clintons.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
Greeleyville, South Carolina – Something is stirring in the U.S.A.. Even in this depressed corner of the country, a place where trains no longer stop and poor families get water from shallow wells, you feel it. A political campaign has become a movement with Barack Obama at its head.
Campaigns are planned. But movements are full of impromptu decisions like the one that delivered Bryant Jones, 25, to this backwater. A few days ago, Jones, who is white and has always leaned Republican, jumped in his car and drove seven hours from Washington D.C. to campaign for Obama, a black Democrat.
“It was his all-encompassing message that got to me,” Jones, a student at George Washington University said. “I feel uplifted by him.”
Obama swept to victory in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, taking 55 percent of the vote, more than double Hillary Clinton’s score. He did so with over 80 percent of the black vote in a heavily African-American state with a charged racial history, and about a quarter of the white vote.
Those are the raw numbers. They are heartening to Obama, who has the wind at his back, but not dispiriting to Clinton, who is looking to contests in states with different social make-ups. Did she take a bullet in South Carolina in order to racialize her fight with Obama going into February 5, when 22 states hold nominating contests?
Certainly, Bill Clinton lost no opportunity to inject race, alluding to Jesse Jackson’s victories here in the 1984 and 1988 Democratic primaries, as if to minimize the significance of Obama’s win and clothe him in Jackson’s marginal mantle. The “first black president,” as he was once called, seemed intent on setting the limits of the first African-American with a real shot at the White House.
Obama, in victory, took a different tack. “The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It’s not about rich versus poor, young versus old, and it’s not about black versus white. This election is about the past versus the future.”
These lines reprised the unifying theme of Obama’s breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention while adding a note that has been critical to his youth-driven momentum: equating Clinton with the status quo.
Certainly, the lure of a different future drew Jones, the young independent of Republican sympathies now wearing Obama buttons.
Jones is from Idaho. He made clear he’d voted for Bush at least once. But he’s now had it with “my-way-or-the-highway politics” and the same old faces.
“I’m 25 and for my entire life a Bush or a Clinton has been in the executive office, either as vice-president or president” he said. “The United States is not about dynasties.”
He’s drawn to Obama’s environmental proposals, his honesty, and what he called “the fact he symbolizes for me that we are at a point where we do not have to think about skin color.” Other Idaho Republican friends were also leaning toward Obama, Jones said.
This young man represents something important. A new generation – for whom race is an issue overcome and baby-boomers are old folk fighting arcane battles and post-9/11 thinking must cede to post-post-9/11 creativity – is hungry for hope and willing to come even to places as hopeless as Greeleyville to demonstrate that.
Obama rightly mocks those who dismiss him as a naïve “hopemonger” and say he has to be “seasoned” in order to “boil all the hope out of him.” This war-stretched, recession-menaced country is confronted by “the fierce urgency of now,” as Martin Luther King put it. A Republican-leaning white kid feels that urgency and makes a political leap, as have myriad others.
In the makeshift Obama campaign center in Greeleyville, I also stumbled on seven Harvard students who’d driven for 16 hours to get out the vote for their post-baby-boom candidate. “I’m here because I believe Obama has a chance at greatness,” said Kishore Kuchibhotla, 27, who’s studying for a biophysics doctorate.
Hannah Fried, 26, a law student, said: “Clinton is what our country has been. She’s not where we’re going, which is more diverse, more global, with fewer expectations about what it means to be black or white. Obama gets this from his upbringing.”
When campaigns become movements, barriers fall. Crumbling Greeleyville has surely never before seen seven Harvard students being offered fried pig skins before going to canvass in African-American homes with well water – and then heading back for class Monday.
This little town suggests Obama has indeed assembled “the most diverse coalition of Americans we’ve seen in a long, long time,” as he put it. It’s now set to include Senator Edward Kennedy. If that growing coalition is beyond race, as I believe, rather than vulnerable to race, as the Clintons seems to have bet, South Carolina will prove no aberration.
Here’s Mr. Krugman:
It’s starting to feel a bit like 1992 again. A Bush is in the White House, the economy is a mess, and there’s a candidate who, in the view of a number of observers, is running on a message of hope, of moving past partisan differences, that resembles Bill Clinton’s campaign 16 years ago.
Now, I’m not sure that’s a fair characterization of the 1992 Clinton campaign, which had a strong streak of populism, beginning with a speech in which Mr. Clinton described the 1980s as a “gilded age of greed.” Still, to the extent that Barack Obama 2008 does sound like Bill Clinton 1992, here’s my question: Has everyone forgotten what happened after the 1992 election?
Let’s review the sad tale, starting with the politics.
Whatever hopes people might have had that Mr. Clinton would usher in a new era of national unity were quickly dashed. Within just a few months the country was wracked by the bitter partisanship Mr. Obama has decried.
This bitter partisanship wasn’t the result of anything the Clintons did. Instead, from Day 1 they faced an all-out assault from conservatives determined to use any means at hand to discredit a Democratic president.
For those who are reaching for their smelling salts because Democratic candidates are saying slightly critical things about each other, it’s worth revisiting those years, simply to get a sense of what dirty politics really looks like.
No accusation was considered too outlandish: a group supported by Jerry Falwell put out a film suggesting that the Clintons had arranged for the murder of an associate, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page repeatedly hinted that Bill Clinton might have been in cahoots with a drug smuggler.
So what good did Mr. Clinton’s message of inclusiveness do him?
Meanwhile, though Mr. Clinton may not have run as postpartisan a campaign as legend has it, he did avoid some conflict by being strategically vague about policy. In particular, he promised health care reform, but left the business of producing an actual plan until after the election.
This turned out to be a disaster. Much has been written about the process by which the Clinton health care plan was put together: it was too secretive, too top-down, too politically tone-deaf. Above all, however, it was too slow. Mr. Clinton didn’t deliver legislation to Congress until Nov. 20, 1993 — by which time the momentum from his electoral victory had evaporated, and opponents had had plenty of time to organize against him.
The failure of health care reform, in turn, doomed the Clinton presidency to second-rank status. The government was well run (something we’ve learned to appreciate now that we’ve seen what a badly run government looks like), but — as Mr. Obama correctly says — there was no change in the country’s fundamental trajectory.
So what are the lessons for today’s Democrats?
First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).
The point is that while there are valid reasons one might support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, the desire to avoid unpleasantness isn’t one of them.
Second, the policy proposals candidates run on matter.
I have colleagues who tell me that Mr. Obama’s rejection of health insurance mandates — which are an essential element of any workable plan for universal coverage — doesn’t really matter, because by the time health care reform gets through Congress it will be very different from the president’s initial proposal anyway. But this misses the lesson of the Clinton failure: if the next president doesn’t arrive with a plan that is broadly workable in outline, by the time the thing gets fixed the window of opportunity may well have passed.
My sense is that the fight for the Democratic nomination has gotten terribly off track. The blame is widely shared. Yes, Bill Clinton has been somewhat boorish (though I can’t make sense of the claims that he’s somehow breaking unwritten rules, which seem to have been newly created for the occasion). But many Obama supporters also seem far too ready to demonize their opponents.
What the Democrats should do is get back to talking about issues — a focus on issues has been the great contribution of John Edwards to this campaign — and about who is best prepared to push their agenda forward. Otherwise, even if a Democrat wins the general election, it will be 1992 all over again. And that would be a bad thing.
Well, it would help if the media would discuss issues instead of just a horse race.
