Civil War

I hope I'm being alarmist about this, but I'm afraid that I'm not. Today the Clinton campaign became officially based on racial division. You can read the statements back and forth on the Ferraro matter. The key is the refusal by the Clinton campaign to "repudiate and reject"and especially to sever Ferraro from her official role in the campaign.

This is about more than Clintonian hypocrisy (the reference of the "repudiate and reject" language, from the debate where Clinton insisted Obama do both when a black supremacist said nice things about him.) It's about setting the white and black races against each other.

Before Iowa, African Americans were not supporting Obama in overwhelming numbers in the polls. When he started winning white votes, they took another look. Now they are watching this campaign closely. They see what happened to a young white Obama advisor who called Hillary a monster, even though she tried to get it off the record, and Clinton people (off the record) have said far worse of Obama. Even though her role was unpaid and informal, the Clinton campaign demanded she be fired, and she "resigned" immediately.

Now they see what happened when an official of the Clinton campaign makes racially inflammatory remarks, not once but twice. That the Clinton campaign did not sever her from the campaign, and then Clinton's campaign manager made accusations against the Obama campaign for its demand that she be severed, was a direct insult to Obama, his campaign, and to African Americans, and to other people who are deeply committed to equality and social justice, and who see this as a social horror.

Today was a primary election day, and the cable networks had their panels of experts, which include African Americans. The black men among them were visibly angry. I expect any black man--and especially any black man who has achieved a white collar, middle class life--is going to be angry. They've heard these insinuations before. Now it no longer matters whether any individual black person thinks Hillary has a better health care plan or might make a better commander in chief. They will circle the wagons around one of their own. Because they are defending themselves.

The Mississippi results seem to me to show what I started seeing in the Ohio results and exit polls: that racial polarization was happening more and more. Black people are circling the wagons around Obama. White people who are inclined towards prejudice are being given permission to express it. You can see it for example in the 70% of Clinton voters in Mississippi who don't want Obama on the ticket at all.

Racial polarization is a winning strategy if you are just counting numbers, because if you can get all the black people to vote for the black candidate and all the white people to vote white, the white candidate wins because there are still more white people voting.

But we're not talking about numbers, although apparently that's all Hillary cares about at the moment. We're talking about starting a Civil War within the Democratic party, and the ground on which it will be fought is a familiar one: Pennsylvania. Only it won't just be Gettysburg. It will be the whole state.

It will eventually be the whole country. I saw a comment somewhere that observed that black talk radio is already treating Hillary with the same fear and contempt as Bush. If it appears that racism is taking the nomination away from Obama, black voters will desert the Democratic party, the nomination won't be worth anything, John McCain will win Pennsylvania and the election, and the Democratic party will be in shambles.

This country has come a long way since the Civil Rights days of the 1960s. It's harder to be racist through ignorance. But racism, like fear of the dark foreigners, can be incited, and it takes on a life of its own when social pressure can't keep it in check.

Some say that Obama would have to face this anyway, because the Republicans would foment racism. But they would do so against the Democratic Party candidate. They would be up against all Democrats. Now it is far more dangerous, because it's happening within the Party, and it is racial, not political.

There is nothing rational about this, so rational analysis is not enough. The Clinton campaign seems consumed by the battle, unable to make reasoned judgments. Even if this gets resolved somehow, I fear for the party and the country if they take over.

If the immediate danger of irrational racial polarization isn't recognized immediately, and if party elders don't put a stop to it immediately, we could be at the beginning of something that will be impossible to control later on. And we'll see the country's future disappear before our eyes.