Monday, January 14, 2008

What's going on

Who knows how far it will go, but there is something toxic going on in the Democratic nomination race. Clinton and Obama have been smart enough to know that appeals based on, respectively, gender and race have to be implicit. But now that they are in the clinches, claims of racial and gender entitlement and grievance are coming out. Hillary is being unfairly criticized for tearing up. Bill is insufficiently deferential to Martin Luther King. Obama is insufficiently gallant when Hillary says her feelings are hurt. Obama is trying to paint Hillary as racially insensitive.

I think both camps have tried to avoid making the identity politics that are implicit in each campaign too obvious because they know that these claims diminish the candidates by suggesting that they ought to be preferred for some reason other than their qualifications. But this stuff is rooted in the Democrat DNA nowdays and I suppose it was inevitable that it would eventually come out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's smart strategy on Bill and Hilary's part - to campaign on race and gender. No matter how much they alienate blacks in the primary campaign, they know that at worst if Obama is denied the nomination that blacks will not vote for any republican - nowdays they wouldn't vote for Lincoln, and just because he was republican. For decades conservatives have tried to point out to blacks that the democrats were taking them for granted and not really acting in their best interests. This is just the liberal chickens coming home to roost...