Chait On The Clintons

"When they hold three fingers in front of your face and say it’s two, I don’t know what to do."

Jon says he wants to hide under his bed rather than counter their pure dishonesty. I’ll be candid. I got a nasty cold this week but I took to bed yesterday, mainly because I felt almost sick from covering the Clintons. They really do get under your skin, as sociopaths can. They make you want to flee all political activity; they make you want to give up; they make you realize that truth and politics need not have any connection if you have long since had your sense of shame surgically removed. Empower them with all the ugliness of Republican race-baiting and hysteria and the cumulative backlash is literally sick-making.

Which is, of course, the point. If they can nauseate an entire generation out of politics, they still have a chance at the spoils.

Republicans For The Clintons

Bulldog Pundit is candid enough about the Limbaugh strategy:

Yes, I’ve considered the fact that whomever the Democrat nominee is will become the next President.  I won’t be voting for either of them in November (I plan to switch back to being a Republican right after the primary), but if one of them does win, I’d rather it be Hillary that Barack Obama.

And no, I won’t feel the least bit “dirty” by voting for Hillary. Given the strategy, I’d feel “dirty” if I didn’t do it.

The race-baiting will be hyped to the rafters by the partisan right. Reynolds, Kaus, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh: they will all be throwing all they can at Obama as a black boogeyman in the next few weeks, and eager to keep Clinton in the game. Beating a Clinton with black and young voters deserting the system en masse this fall will be relatively easy. And so using Jeremiah Wright against Obama is critical now, under the cover of the Clinton campaign.

I should add that the Wright issue is not out of bounds. It was always there; it is still there. Obama has addressed it and has to re-address it. You will see more of Wright on Fox News in the coming months than you will John Gibson. But the glee with which the partisan right is trying to conflate the racism of Wright with the post-racial politics of Obama is a depressing spectacle. I think they understand that keeping this country divided by racial suspicion is in their interests. Obama threatens that model. He has to find a way to get through this. He can’t be adding to the fray. He needs to give another speech – a big speech – about the need for America to overcome these feelings. He needs to pivot off this campaign. And get off defense – which he cannot win – and onto offense, with a positive, constructive, multiracial message that uses today’s toxic headlines for chart a less toxic path to a strong showing in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

Obama’s Testing

Look: the racial politics of all this was bound to happen at some point. We should not be surprised by the likes of Mickey Kaus or Sean Hannity or Geraldine Ferraro fanning racial resentment and fear. Since it is part of everyone’s emotional make-up in America, we were never going to get past these issues without going through them. And as we go through them, we shouldn’t engage in utopian notions that we could ever have a campaign in which these things would not at some point dominate. Better now than in October.

What matters now is how Obama gets through them. I fear a spasm of constantly ratcheting squalls of racial insecurity and loathing, which drags everyone down to the level on which the Clintons operate and where they feel most at home. Obama therefore has a brutal job to do. But he has so far shown the grace to pull it off. Patience, restraint, hope: that’s all we have to go on right now. But those three things can still win the presidency, if harnessed carefully enough.

Could She Ever Win The Popular Vote?

The logic behind this seems inescapable to me:

For the record, Senator Obama came out of the Mississippi primary with an advantage of 99,000 votes over Senator Clinton, more than I had predicted based on his edge in Alabama. That puts his margin in the nationwide popular vote — by a measure that includes Florida but not Michigan — at more than 500,000.

As I noted yesterday, it will take a colossal victory, almost 60%, for Clinton to get a 200,000 vote edge out of Pennsylvania. And if she does that, there is no plausible scheme under which she could pick up the remaining 300,000 votes to gain even the dubious moral claim of an edge in the popular vote.

The racial stuff is a sign of desperation. The Clintons have to find a way to destroy Obama in the next month or so or his claim on the nomination will be democratically irresistible. Obama needs to chill and fight fairly on. It’s his to lose – unless they get into his head, and everyone else’s, with the kind of emotional hoopla that Ferraro represents. Eyes on the prize, guys.

And I’m not just sure about that. I’m HIV-positive.

Quote For The Day

“So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late,” – Barack Obama, January 20, 2008.

Beyond The Black Box

A reader writes:

Mickey is being deliberately obtuse, as is Ferraro. It is really breathtaking that anyone who has paid any attention to this campaign could seriously maintain that Obama’s blackness is the sum total of what he brings to the race, or the reason he has won it. His superb out-organizing of Hillary alone proves that to be nonsense. And what it says at base is that a person’s blackness is the only thing that someone like Ferraro is willing to notice, regardless of what that person has achieved and what gifts and talents the person brings to bear. And if such an attitude is not racist, the word has no meaning.

Ferraro’s statement and Mickey’s post amount to a statement that black people can just forget it if they think this country is willing to let them escape the box that we have put them in.

Boxes, however, make people comfortable. All you can do is endure against that impulse. It’s maddening to know, for example, that Mickey will always see me, beneath everything, as gay. That’s the box I’m in; and short of denying that box or ignoring it altogether, I cannot win with the Kauses of this world. But I can hope that younger people will see outside this box, as well as in it. Seeing both is the key. That’s the hope Obama represents and it’s why watching the forces of reaction and resentment this week has become so intensely depressing. But if I didn’t believe that the box could be overcome, I wouldn’t have supported Obama in the first place. I’m not alone in hoping for this.

Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.