Civil War, Yes We Are

It's happening, and no one knows where it will take us. Except that if Democrats manage not to self-destruct, the resurrection of identity politics may be enough for Republicans to destroy their chances in 2008.

While the Ferarro affair continued to echo, the seriousness of the situation in the black community was becoming more obvious in the media. From the LA Times:

This is a virtual race war, politically," said the Rev. Eugene Rivers of the Azusa Christian Community church in Boston, one of the country's leading Pentecostal ministers.

In the close contest between two popular candidates, strong emotions are often spurred by nuance and competing interpretations of comments and events. Rivers said black voters were especially offended by Clinton's suggestion this week that Obama could join her on the ticket as her running mate."Blacks aren't going to sit back while the winning candidate is told to sit at the back of the bus," he said, adding that the Democratic Party and Clinton risk handing the election to the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain.

Bishop Charles E. Blake of Los Angeles, as leader of the Church of God in Christ, which claims 6 million members nationwide and abroad, presides over one of the largest Christian denominations in the country. He said in an interview that black voters could come to feel so disheartened that "their whole motivation for participating in the political process in this election would be greatly reduced."

The anger, which is not by any means restricted to the black community, is fed by the growing suspicion that none of this is accidental: that the Clinton campaign is fomenting a race war as a political calculation, especially in Pennsylvania. That impression is helped by Ed Rendell, the governor of the Commonwealth who supports Clinton, repeating his view that some whites in PA will not vote for a black man. The point isn't whether this is a true statement, but that it is a repeated one, which encourages those so disposed to express their prejudice to feel entirely justified in doing so.

Not everyone in PA is taking this lying down. An editorial in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette--which I am therefore proud to say I used to write for--said this:

The question that has to be asked is the degree to which Ms. Ferraro's remarks are in response to advice Mrs. Clinton may be receiving from some of Pennsylvania's professional politicians to the effect that people here might be susceptible in advance of the April primary to the sort of argument she is peddling.

If that is what they are telling her, they are wrong in telling her that Pennsylvanians will respond favorably to a racist pitch. We are not like that. As we make this important choice for ourselves and for the country, we will not consider a candidate's race or gender as the principal factor in the choice we make. Mrs. Clinton should give Pennsylvanians credit for sound judgment, not appeal to what she might believe are our prejudices...

Mrs. Clinton should have fired Ms. Ferraro immediately. What Ms. Ferraro said simply validated all the claims that the Clinton campaign constitutes a return to the dirty-tricks politics of the past.

PA is in the position to end this, but they didn't start it. Now it's become clear that nearly a quarter of the vote Hillary got in Mississippi was Republican crossover--which the exit polls suggest was 1)mischiefmaking at the behest of Rush Limbaugh and 2) white racism being expressed. The combination likely cost Obama up to 10 earned delegates. The racist component in Ohio's exit polls is there for all to see, and there's suspicion it was a factor in Texas. (Here's a more detailed analysis of Mississippi exit polls.)

Now I count among fellow alarmists Countdown's Keith Olbermann, whose Special Comment lambasted the Clinton campaign for, among other things, giving "Congresswoman Ferraro nearly a week in which to send Senator Clinton`s campaign back into the vocabulary of David Duke..."

Yet even the day after this, in the midst of her strongest attempt at an apology, Clinton again linked Obama and Jesse Jackson in the same sentence, marking him as Bill Clinton has done in South Carolina, as the Black Candidate.

Now the aspect of the Clinton 3AM commercial that I wrote about last week has become part of the dialogue:

As Karl Rove has proven and as Orlando Patterson pointed out in the New York Times, campaigns and their messages are often more about image than substance. Was it an oversight or a design that the children sleeping safely in that 3 a.m. ad were white? Isn't everyone in politics astute enough to know these days that everyone who needs protecting isn't white?

Or as I wrote here at American Dash on March 5: If you deconstruct Hillary's "3 AM" ad, it appeals to the fears of white women for their children (the only people in the ad are white women and white children), and what are they afraid of? Is it really about the experience to make sound decisions in a crisis? Or is it about white mom protecting her children against threatening dark-skinned men?

If you believe that ad really is only about national security, then you probably believe that the Willy Horton ad was about the criminal justice system.

Ferraro couched her own racially divisive and racist comments in the context of feminism, repeating the line that another 70s womens lib leader, Gloria Steinem coined, that sexism is more prevalent and virilent in America than racism. I'll leave it to another woman of my generation to express my point of view--she does it very well--but here again there is the political calculation: there are many older white women voting in Democratic primaries, especially in PA. And there's nothing like this remnant of identity politics, particularly when led by affluent white women who claim to be among the most downtrodden group in America, that turns off Democrats and turns away Republicans.

It's gotten so extreme that I've seen an even more nefarious theory: that Clinton, in the likely futile attempt to get this year's nomination, doesn't care if she helps elect John McBush in the process, because that way she can run in 2012--especially if she can destroy her most powerful rival, Barack Obama. (It's at the very end of this otherwise informative set of links.)

You know, it would seem pretty far-fetched, except...it's about a Clinton.