10 days that led to a controversy over race
Posted: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 11:32 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Democrats
From NBC’s Domenico Montanaro
For 10 days, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have gotten into a back-and-forth that has touched off a controversy over race, potentially exposed a wound in the Democratic Party between black voters and women and wound up with another Clinton surrogate bringing up Obama's teen drug use.
How did we get here?
It all started when John Edwards leapt to Barack Obama's defense and called Hillary Clinton the "status quo" at the Jan. 5 debate before the New Hampshire debate.
"We have a fundamental difference about the way you bring about change," Edwards said of himself and Obama after Clinton questioned Obama's record, including voting for the Patriot Act. "But both of us are powerful voices for change. And if I might add, we finished first and second in the Iowa caucus, I think in part as a result of that. Now, what I would say this: Any time you speak out powerfully for change, the forces of status quo attack."
Clinton responded by touting the changes she said she's made over 35 years and then saying, "And we don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered."
All of this ended in a humorous moment in the debate, when Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) summed it up, "Well, I've been in hostage negotiations that are a lot more civil than this."
That may have ended the line of conversation, but it didn't end the debate. For the next several days, the candidates took their barbs on the road.
Obama, for one, made Hillary's "false hopes" a talking point in at least two speeches.
"You know, I've been teased, even derided lately, for talking hope," Obama said the following day. "Last night in the debate, one of my opponents said that you know, 'You need to stop offering the American [people] false hopes about what can get done. You need a reality check.' You remember that? Now think, think about that as a concept. Think about that -- not not -- 'imagine that we're going to the moon and we'll figure out a way to do it. Understand we can't do that. We can't rebuild Japan and Germany after we defeated them in war -- that would make no sense. Why would we do that?"
Then this on Monday, Jan. 7.
"Imagine that -- false hopes. Imagine John F. Kennedy looking up at the moon, and saying, 'Darn, that's far,'" he said to laughter and applause. " 'We can't do that. Reality check. Can't be done. Imagine -- imagine Dr. King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out at those crowds -- a quarter million people around the reflecting pool -- and saying, 'Ya'll go home.' The dream has died. It can't be done. It's too hard.' Lost hopes? You know, this is what this campaign is all about."
JFK and men on the moon, MLK and the Lincoln Memorial. That prompted Clinton to say something that landed her and Obama, frankly, into the bubbling cauldron of race and politics, a messy and dangerous place both candidates have tried hard to avoid.
“I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dreams were realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Clinton said in an interview with Fox News. “When he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done.”
Later that night, she made it part of her stump and began to attack Obama essentially as no Dr. King or John F. Kennedy.
“You know, today Senator Obama used President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to criticize me,” Clinton said. “And, basically compared himself to two of our greatest heroes, saying well, they gave great speeches.
“President Kennedy was in the Congress for 14 years. He was a war hero. He was a man of great accomplishments and readiness to be president. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement. He was gassed. He was beaten. He was jailed. And he gave a speech that was one of the most beautifully, profoundly important speeches ever delivered in America, the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
“And then he worked with President Johnson to get the civil rights laws passed, because the dream couldn’t be realized until it was finally, it was legally permissible for people of all colors and backgrounds and races and ethnicities to be accepted as citizens.”
The next day, Tuesday, Jan. 8, Obama was asked about Clinton saying he was not comparable to Kennedy and King. He smiled confidently and said, “You know, I didn’t claim to be.”
That day, a Clinton supporter, in introducing her invoked Kennedy’s assassination.
"If you look back, some people have been comparing one of the other candidates to JFK, and he was a wonderful leader," said Francine Torge, a retired teacher from Durham, N.H. "He gave us a lot of hope. But he was assassinated, and Lyndon Baines Johnson actually did all of his work and got both the Republicans and Democrats to pass those measures."
That day, Clinton scored a victory in the New Hampshire primary, which the whole political world, including the campaigns, got wrong before a vote was cast. Obama, the inevitable, was uprooted, partly because of a strong turnout of women for Clinton.
After the victory, politicos searched for more reasons. Race was called into question as one of the possibilities. After all, there had been a history of African-American candidates with large leads a week before an election, who lost, in part, because of anonymity. White voters, who said they were undecided, for example, in a Field poll in 1982 in the California gubernatorial election between George Deukmejian, who was white, and Tom Bradley, who was black, appear to have known all along who they were voting for: the white candidate. But they didn’t want to tell a pollster that.
Meanwhile, a Jan. 7 Bill Clinton remark, calling Obama’s record on his stance on the Iraq war a “fairy tale” got caught up in the mix. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen,” Clinton said after lambasting what he said was a flip by Obama on the Iraq war from his vaunted 2002 speech to a more ambiguous stance at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
But Clinton’s remark was interpreted by some prominent African Americans to be a shot at the possibility of Obama’s campaign.
“To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us," said Rep. Jim Clyburn, the senior most African-American member of Congress, who had vowed to remain neutral in the Democratic primary process.
Former Bill Clinton aide Donna Brazile added, “As an African American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.”
NBC’s Tim Russert produced both quotes for Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press. Clinton vigorously defended her husband’s comment, saying it had been taken out of context.
On her remarks on King, Clinton unabashedly accused the Obama campaign of injecting race into the process, saying it was “deliberately distorting” her remarks clandestinely.
"This is, you know, an unfortunate story line that the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully,” Clinton told Russert. “They've been putting out talking points, they've been making this, they've been telling people in a very selective way what the facts are, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to set the facts straight."
As the Obama campaign recoiled, later in the day, the flames were stoked even higher. Clinton supporter Bob Johnson, founder of BET and owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, made a thinly veiled reference to Obama’s teen drug use and went further. He accused Obama of acting like “Sidney Poitier,” insinuating an accusation that many was settled, that Obama isn’t black enough.
“As an African American,” Johnson began, “I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues, when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book-- when they have been involved, to say that these two people would denigrate the accomplishment of civil rights marchers, men and women who were hosed, beaten and bled, and some died.
“To say and to expect us now all of a sudden to say we are attacking a black man. That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me or a guy that says I want to be a reasonable, likeable Sidney Poitier 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' And I'm thinking to myself, this ain't a movie, Sidney."
Yesterday, Clinton, speaking in New York City at a labor event for better working conditions for private security officers, honored Dr. King’s legacy -- on the eve of his birthday -- and said, "Who would have thought we would ever see the day that an African-American and a woman would be running for president of the United States of America?"
And last night, sensing that this back-and-forth had gotten out of hand, Obama and Clinton called for a truce. Obama met with reporters in Nevada and said he didn’t want the campaigns “to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this.”
Clinton then followed with a statement, in which she said much of what’s been said “does not reflect what is in our hearts.” She added that she and Obama are “on the same side” when it comes to civil rights and called for seeking “common ground.” She called the party and nation “bigger than this” and lauded the Democratic Party’s role in being “on the front line” for equal rights.
But just as Clinton was putting out the statement New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, a prominent black Clinton supporter, seemed willing to continue the fight. He said it was “absolutely stupid” and “absolutely dumb” for Obama “to infer that Dr. King, alone, passed the legislation and signed it into law,” something Obama never actually said. And then Rangel went further accusing Obama’s of writing about his teenage drug use in an effort to sell books.
Has the damage to a party already been done, or at least a wound exposed? And does this also not only expose a generational divide in the Democratic Party in general, but also within the black community?
What would Dr. King have thought of the last 10 days?
