‘Et tu, Brute?’
The CW among American commentators is that anything a candidate or his/her surrogate does or says is ‘political.’ (Given that they mean ‘calculated, insincere,’ it’s bemusing how often this constitutes an admiring assessment. When gun-control supporter Hillary Clinton, eg, talked nostalgically to Pennsylvania’s guns-and-churches crowd about how her grandfather had taught her to shoot as a child, commentators all but stood and cheered her political astuteness.)
Yet one drama of the Democratic nomination struggle is how often the politicizing is driven by profoundly intimate imperatives – in the grip of which, the speaker may heedlessly surrender his grasp on the historical world and stand revealed, awfully.
Such a moment was Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson in South Carolina after African-Americans had voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Most commentators understood Clinton’s remark was meant to trigger white racial solidarity against the black Obama. But few identified the libidinal irruption of stung hubris beneath the alleged political savvy. The ‘first black president’ had, with much fanfare, personally campaigned door-to-door in the state’s black neighbourhoods, after all.
And none, so far as this columnist has seen, has since remarked that, in unleashing the Redneck within, Clinton doomed his wife’s presidential bid – for since Clinton’s heedless alienation of black voters, the all-important superdelegates have known only too well that they cannot ‘steal’ the nomination from Obama without triggering an African-American boycott of the general election massive enough to seal Senator Clinton’s – and the Democrats’ – defeat.
Last weekend, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright walked the same drear road as Bill Clinton, and to the same end. He had better hope his buffoonish irruption onto centre stage of the campaign doesn’t destroy Obama, where nothing else could: in the folklore of the tribe, a ‘Jeremiah Wright’ – a reference to a black pastor who knowingly subverted a member of his flock when he was on the threshold of becoming The First African-American President of the United States – could easily displace a sobriquet like ‘Uncle Tom,’ and last as long.
But perhaps Wright doesn’t care. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, except perhaps for the fury of a longstanding mentor towards a novitiate who suddenly sweeps by him and leaves him behind. In the tenor and content of Wright’s three public appearances last weekend you could hear the plates flying. Spewing an hypnotic mix of weird self-admiration, legitimate beefs, contempt for Obama and paranoia, Wright has landed like a monkey on Obama’s back; and with public appearances already scheduled for the end of June, he clearly means to go on clinging there. And while the uncommitted superdelates were reported to be hugely relieved when Obama finally disowned him, white America was enthralled, confused, and not a little dismayed by Wright’s contagious spectacle.
(Granted, they were given almost nothing else to watch by their TV news channels all week.)
The result is that Obama has since been slipping steadily in the polls. Indeed, the miracle is that, beset by such an apparition from hell – a distorted black pastor given Icarean wings by the gleeful US media – Obama’s numbers haven’t collapsed entirely.
On Wednesday evening, an NBC/WSJ poll showed the race closing up; yet Obama still led Clinton by three points nationally and was favoured to beat McCain by three points to her one.
By Friday, however, as Wright-mania continued unabated, Gallup and Rasmussen showed Clinton pulling ahead – and, more immediately, taking the lead and closing the gap respectively in Tuesday’s upcoming primaries in Indiana and North Carolina.
In Indiana, Clinton’s lead by the polls remains small. Indiana is much younger than Pennsylvania and, unlike Pennsylvania, has far more Protestants than Catholics (for ‘Catholics’ read mainly Latinos and ex-European ‘ethnics,’ the never-vote-for-a-black-man demographic); and both factors should help Obama. But in Indiana, as in Pennsylvania, a suspiciously high number of Undecideds, 14 per cent at this late date, suggests Clinton may wind up taking the state by perhaps high single digits. ‘Undecided’ has functioned in most states so far as a euphemism for ‘covert racist.’
(This prediction admittedly runs counter to that of a Daily Kos blogger calling himself ObamaManiac, whose sophisticated county-by-county analyses prior to the earlier primaries have proved remarkably accurate. On Wednesday, ObamaManiac gave Clinton only a 2-delegate pick-up from Indiana.)
In North Carolina by Friday, Obama’s 15-point lead of a week ago was down to seven points. He still leads big among men (56-38), blacks (88-5), and the under-30s (67-29), and gets 30 per cent of the white vote – more than he did in other Southern states. But he will need to hold that margin.
The decibels of media excitement over Clinton’s ‘momentum’ – really, Obama’s Wright-induced slippage – were so high, that a couple voices and indices calmly implying that the race was already over and Obama had won were startling (even to this columnist).
The first was voters’ answer to a question in the NBC/WSJ poll. Asked what gave them the greatest pause about any candidate in the race, 34 per cent said Obama’s ‘bitter-cling’ remarks, 36 per cent said Hillary’s pandering flipflops – and fully 43 per cent identified McCain’s closeness to the hated President Bush. Obama-Wright came in fourth, at 32 per cent.
(“Think of that!” exclaimed MSNBC’s Chris Matthews disbelievingly. “George W Bush is a greater albatross to McCain than Reverend Wright is to Obama!” It was instructive that, on the fifth anniversary of Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq – the toll so far: half-a-million Iraqis and 4,000 US troops dead; 30,000 US troops seriously injured, and $600 billion drained from the US Treasury –Matthews should have been so hypnotized by his own Wright excitement as to be surprised that the words of one damaged African-American pastor should not have outweighed the catastrophic policies of the Bush administration in voters’ eyes.)
The next was Jimmy Carter’s calm assertion, to CNN’s inimitable Wolf Blitzer, that the rules of the Democratic Party required it to nominate the candidate with the most delegates, period, and he expected the superdelegates would do so. (“That’s code for Obama!” exclaimed the scandalized Wolf. But Carter calmly demurred.)
And the third and most important reality check came from the superdelegates themselves. In the wake of Wright’s prima donna performance – and in the wake, also, of Obama’s ‘bitter’ gaffe, his embarrassing toss at bowling – a big deal in lunch-pail America! – and the loss of three big states, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, in a row, superdelegates went right on breaking for Obama. Key among them was Joe Andrew, an Indiana native who – installed by Bill Clinton – was the DNC’s Chairman from 1999-2001, and who last Thursday switched his support from Clinton to endorse Obama.
For the moment, however, it’s about Tuesday. If either candidate wins both states, it’ll be at least a small earthquake in his or her favour, of course. But if they split states, Obama will need to win North Carolina by at least a slightly bigger margin than Clinton wins Indiana for him to go on safely running out the clock.