In her op-ed in today's New York Daily News about why she continues in the primary race, Hillary Clinton references her RFK comments briefly before moving on to a bunch of platitudes recycled from her stump speech.  First she insists again that she was simply trying to make "the simple point that given our history, the length of this year's primary contest is nothing unusual."  This point, is, of course, not supported by her examples.  The 1968 primary season began on March 12, so its length was less than three months; even leaving aside the fact that Bill Clinton's nomination was a foregone conclusion by March of 1992, the primaries that year began a month and a half later than they did this year.  But that's not really the problem.  

The problem is that her explanation of what she said was followed by this:

I realize that any reference to that traumatic moment for our nation can be deeply painful - particularly for members of the Kennedy family, who have been in my heart and prayers over this past week. And I expressed regret right away for any pain I caused.

But I was deeply dismayed and disturbed that my comment would be construed in a way that flies in the face of everything I stand for - and everything I am fighting for in this election.

She drops the issue after that.

She seems to think that her reminder that she "expressed regret right away," followed by a declaration of surprise that contains at least as much indignation as it does chagrin, should suffice to clear it all up.  She makes no effort at all to address the issue of why her comments would be construed in such a surprising way.  She isn't the least bit curious about how "everything she is fighting for" could have dropped so completely out of view, and the most negative possible connotation could have been detected in her words.  She literally seems to have no idea that her campaign has brought everyone but her die-hard supporters to a point where we assume everything that comes out of her mouth to be a double-edged sword, a destructive attempt to undermine the likely Democratic nominee.  

Don't get me wrong; I don't think for a minute that she was expressing a secret wish that Obama would meet with Kennedy's fate.  On the contrary, by picking her husband and RFK as examples even though they're not very good illustrations of her point, she seems pretty clearly to be trying to connect her own candidacy to both of those others, and to claim their merits as her own.  And I also don't imagine that in an op-ed intended to bolster her candidacy she's going to engage in genuine soul-searching about her campaign's effect on the mood of the electorate.  But she's a politician.  If she realized how toxic her campaign had become for the party, wouldn't she have said something intended to blame the misinterpretations on some small group of enemies, or to minimize the significance of the fact that so many people instantly came to the same ominous conclusion about what she meant?

But no.  Just simple shock and hurt: "how could you think that about me?"  

She really doesn't know.  

The problem with Clinton's campaign at this point is that she thinks she can just continue to assure everyone that of course the party will rally.  It's happened before; she doesn't see a difference between this battle and others she's witnessed.  She doesn't take seriously the genuine terror of a growing number of Democratic voters at the prospect of losing the election in the fall.  She hears the support from her own voters, but she doesn't see the anger from the other side, the anger at someone who seems willing to sacrifice their dearest hopes for a chance at her own advancement.  I don't care if she doesn't think that Obama's candidacy really represents a new set of possibilities in politics.  Doesn't, shouldn't it matter to her that his voters do?  If she really thinks she can win the nomination, and she really wants Obama voters to support her in the fall, shouldn't she be scared right now that so many of them seem to see her as quite capable of calling for his assassination?  Scared enough to try to figure out what's gone wrong, to try to correct their image of her as someone who is bent on achieving her will at any cost: to the facts, to her party, to her opponent himself?  
The problem with Clinton, in a nutshell, is that she doesn't seem to get that when you cast yourself as a "fighter," you gain a certain power but you also make an enemy out of anyone going up against you.  And if you want those enemies as allies later on, a good fighter needs to be a lot more clued in than she seems to be about what kinds of obstacles you're putting in the way of ever winning them over.

[Given the rhetoric flying around these days, I feel the need to explain that this is not a threat that I wouldn't vote for her if she were the nominee, or that Obama supporters in general won't or shouldn't.  My opposition to Clinton isn't so principled that I'd give up the right to choose, the separation of church and state, or limits on corporate power in politics for it.  I'm just deeply concerned that someone who's going to continue to have an important role in my party seems to be so deaf to any reactions to her other than those she wants to hear.]

Imagine this:

Barack Obama sits down for an interview to discuss how the campaign has gone thus far, and he launches into a long analysis of how the "racism" and "hatred of blacks" in the media has marred coverage of him.

Not bloody likely, is it?

Hillary Clinton has been on a media tear in the last few days to convince people that America has rid itself of racism while allowing sexism to flourish in broad daylight with impunity.  This isn't entirely unfounded; racism has become taboo enough that it has to be buried in subtexts, while sexism rides closer to the surface.  The b-word can be uttered on cable news outlets; the n-word, hardly.

But the curious result of our unanimity about the fact that racism is a Bad Thing is that it's had the effect of making all accusations of racism (short of the evidence of the n-word or something equally obvious) seem hysterical, paranoid, and positively Godwinesque.  Calling someone a racist is, in the public imagination, close enough to calling them a Nazi that you can't really get away with it unless they're wearing a swastika or a hood.  Obama mentions that his grandmother (presumably like every other white woman of her age in her town, and lots of different kinds of people everywhere) is anxious when she encounters a black man on the street; he's "thrown her under the bus!"  Clinton accuses "the big boys" of trying to sabotage her entire political career because she's a woman, and it's just righteous anger.  Maybe it's because so many more Americans have experienced it and can recognize it, maybe it's because it doesn't bear the legacy of violence and isolation that our racial history does, but sexism seems to have a place in our national dialogue that racism doesn't.

I don't mean to take part in the "which is worse?" wars, which have only served to deafen people who see one prejudice operating to hearing accounts of the other.  I think it's probably safe to say that both have been present in subtle and less subtle ways in the public's and the media's treatment of the Democratic primary, and that both have probably been detected in comments or actions that don't really justify it.  But as the "historic no matter what" candidacy winds down, I do think it's worth weighing what's been said in the open against what's gone unsaid, and trying both to speak and to hear more of the latter instead of just dealing with the issues that are easiest to air in public.  As an honest conversation about race or gender, this primary has been a pretty awkward first step, but it would be nice to think that a second one is coming in both cases. 

If anyone else is as hungry as I had been to see some of the contexts from which the MSM's Jeremiah Wright clips had been lifted, here and here are a couple of much longer excerpts from the sermons in which "America's chickens" and "God damn America" occur.  In the second case especially the soundbite version gets it wrong (and Bill Clinton is labeled an "intelligent friend" of civil rights).

Newsweek is reporting that the Clinton campaign is, indeed, going there.

The relevant passage:

After the 1980 battle between Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, her chief strategist Harold Ickes noted, the party changed a rule that required pledged delegates to stick with their candidates no matter what. The current rule, adopted in 1982, states that pledged delegates "shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them." A "good conscience" reason for a delegate to switch, Ickes told NEWSWEEK, would be if one candidate—such as, say, Clinton—was deemed more "electable." If delegates believe she has a better chance in November than Obama, Ickes said, "you bet" that would be a reason to change their vote. (He added, however, that the campaign is "focused" on winning over uncommitted superdelegates "at this point.")

So there's this rhetorical figure called antithesis.  It involves contrasting two starkly opposing ideas, to emphasize the distance between them.  It can come off heavy-handed in a written text, but it's a staple of just about any of your great oral traditions, from Greece to hip hop.  If African American oratory were a toolbox, antithesis would be its hammer--it's the tool you use the most often because it's so damn versatile and powerful.  It can emphasize the chasm between the way things are and the way they ought to be.  That's what it's doing in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1963 speech at the march on Washington:

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

It can dramatize how starkly two separate realities differ.  That's what it's doing when young Frederick Douglass looks out at the ships on Chesapeake Bay and thinks of them:

You are loose from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and a slave.  You move merrily before the gentle gale; and I sadly before the bloody whip.  You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron!

It can measure the extent to which conventional wisdom misrepresents reality.  That's what it's doing in the Jeremiah Wright, Jr. sermon that seems to have raised the most hackles:

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes three-strike laws and wants them to sing God Bless America.
No! No No!
God damn America … for killing innocent people.
God damn America for threatening citizens as less than humans.
God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and supreme.

See, it works because "damn" is the opposite of "bless."  You may or may not like the vehemence of the condemnation, but I don't think there's any doubt that Wright is not "damning America" in a theological sense; he's condemning particular actions and ideologies.  He's saying the criminal justice system plays God with the lives of Americans, and that it does so unequally.  He's calling attention to the inappropriateness of complacent piety about this country when it's screwing its citizens over so badly.  He's expressing some fairly widely shared progressive sentiments, in words that may be jarring but that most certainly have their place in the tradition in which he's grounded.  He's making a connection between Jesus's teachings and the life we actually live, a connection that black churches have emphasized ever since their inception, when they were militant in rejecting the ways in which southern clergy were using the Bible to justify slavery and counsel "submission."  I've heard, explicitly and implicitly, an assumption on the part of commenters that religious services should be apolitical.  Black churches have never been apolitical.  They never had that option; their existence was political in itself.

I don't imagine that the general public does or should know that tradition; I don't really care if it's interested.  But there's a problem with excerpting the words of a sermon from their context and interpreting them as, say, a campaign press release.  Those words have a place, and in that church, to that congregation, they mean something that you can't necessarily read correctly outside of it.  There's also a problem with excerpting one snippet from one sermon from the entire spiritual life of a faith community and making it representative.  Wright's anger is the flip side of his lifelong work for social justice, and Wright is just one pastor among an entire community of people committed to that goal.

So could we come up with just a little outrage about the religious policing that's going on here to go along with our tortured forecasts of what the GOP is going to do with Wright in the fall? 

...comes an article with the headline:

Pa. leaders, Clinton aides say Obama disrespects state

Obama's campaign chief had called Pennsylvania "only one of ten remaining contests."

The article then want on to describe how the Obama aides, when asked to add two and two, had the temerity to answer "four."

I'm not writing to disagree with M.J. Rosenberg, with whom I wholly agree that one's pastor should not be considered a spokesperson.  But I do think that Jeremiah Wright's story is relevant simply for contextualizing what it has to do with Obama and his run.  The wingnuts raving about Obama's crazy, America-hating pastor never mention Wright's military service (during which he received two presidential commendations), but I bring it up here to establish a timeline.

In 1961, the year that Wright joined the marines, nine students about his age from all-black Tougaloo College in Mississippi were arrested for entering the all-white main branch of the Jackson public library and sitting at tables to read books not available in the "colored" library.  Peaceful protesters at their trial were attacked with tear gas and police dogs.

In 1963, the year that he transferred from the Marines to the Navy to train as a cardiopulmonary technician, four young girls were killed on a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama when their church, a meeting place for civil rights activists, was bombed.  

In 1967, the year he was discharged from the Navy, a trial was held in Neshoba County, Mississippi for the killers of three civil rights workers aged 20-24: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney.  The murders had been orchestrated by the county's deputy sheriff, probably with the knowledge of the sheriff himself, who belonged to the same cell of the Ku Klux Klan as his deputy.  Among the jurors was an admitted former Klansman whose participation was challenged by the defense; their challenge was denied by the trial judge, an ardent segregationist.  When seven of the eighteen defendants were convicted, the judge imposed sentences of four to ten years, saying "They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man...I gave them all what I thought they deserved."

Think about what it must have felt like for Wright to have been serving his country while these things were going on.  The pride in the service, and the despair and rage at what was happening in the country he served, among its citizens and in its institutions.  Patriotism has always contained a paradox for black people.  On the one hand, we love and cherish the ideals our country is based on.  On the other hand, the Constitution, the document in which those founding ideals are spelled out so confidently, also contains a clause defining black slaves as three fifths of a person, not in order to grant them even a three-fifths share of the rights enumerated there, but to increase the power of slaveholding states by allowing their slaves to count when allocating members of the House of Representatives and of the Electoral College.

That paradoxical feeling we have long had, of carrying a crushing, passionate love for this country alongside a bitter disappointment in much of its past and its present, must be why it's very easy for me to hear Wright's anger toward his country in what I think is the accurate way, as directed toward its baser realities not from the lack of but BECAUSE of his patriotism, because of an unbending belief that we should be--must be--better.  The kind of patriotism that demands unsparing criticism of your country's moral failings is the kind Obama alludes to by taking off his flag pin to distinguish it from blind submission, I think, and the kind that those who are offended by that gesture don't consider patriotism at all.  Seeing Wright's influence in Obama doesn't scare me one bit.  What amazes me is the extent to which Obama has been able to take up the aspirational elements of that criticism and somehow escape the sense of impotence and despair that it tends to engender.  That he's truly done so is evident in every aspect of his campaign.  

Anyone who doesn't get that when they cool down is already beyond the reach of this campaign.

If I never heard the phrase "race card" again, it would be eleventy billion years too soon.  But since I know I'm not likely to make it even through the rest of the evening, I decided to take a little solace in MLK's "Letter From Birmingham Jail."  I would like to print a lot of copies, fold each one into a lovely origami swan, and cram one down the throat of each and every person who works for Fox "News."

Instead, I'll just mention here that my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal in many states when they tied the knot, and my childhood home was pelted with rocks after this couple moved in with their toddler son and their newborn daughter.  I was the newborn; it was 1973.  The aforementioned home was in a residential neighborhood in what I'm pretty sure is the most liberal of the multitudes of small New England college towns.

Descriptions of Jeremiah Wright's sermons as filled with "hate"or as "anti-white" seem to me to imagine a greater distance than I believe there is between the present day and past times when that kind of anger was appropriate.  Many seem to take it for granted that he's clearly expressing a generalized resentment of white people and not targeted anger at a specific class of powerholders who do, now, in actual fact, perpetuate injustice, racial and otherwise.  I'm also not sure that the ways we retell history help us to remember that anger was a primary engine behind all of the social liberation movements of the second half of the 20th century, not a pathology.

Here's an excerpt from the "Letter":

"I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'nigger,' your middle name becomes 'boy' (however old you are) and your last name becomes 'John,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

This is Wright's rhetorical tradition.  Angry, yes; hateful, no.  You can certainly argue that the time for such sentiments is past, but it's worth remembering the role they have played in our not-so-distant past.

The recent flap over the Secret Service’s opening an Obama rally in Dallas to thousands who hadn’t been screened for weapons has gotten me thinking about all of the southern black women who, earlier in the primary season, kept being quoted as being wary of Obama’s candidacy because they feared for his safety and wouldn’t want to help put him in harm’s way.

As a rationale for choosing a candidate, that didn’t make any sense to me then and it doesn’t make any sense to me now, but I think I might have finally realized where that fear really comes from. What if it’s not for him but for ourselves? Recently I’ve started reading the comments sections of election posts in news outlets and various blogs, and in addition to the expected partisan back-and-forth, there are always at least a few transparently racist and demonstrably false rumors about Obama that get repeated over and over. Every time I see one I begin to compile a well-documented, unanswerable rebuttal, collecting multiple unimpeachable sources for each correction, and then I catch myself. I remember that the people writing those comments aren’t reading the other comments. They know Obama hates God and the military and America, and they’re not looking to change their opinions.

So why do I always feel such a strong compulsion to answer them? Because my heart has started racing and my stomach’s started churning and HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY BE THAT PEOPLE CAN BE SO VILE AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT??? I feel helpless and lost and enraged and despairing and ashamed of the country I love, and doing something, even something as pointless as answering those comments, distracts me for the first, worst searing moments of it. That’s what it feels like to be a black woman reading those comments. It hurts, and it’s scary. And God help me, if Obama gets nominated I’m going to feel that way a lot more over the next several months. So maybe when those nice black ladies down south say they're afraid for Obama, that’s their way of saying that they’re really afraid for themselves. I know I am.

So yesterday in Ohio HRC told a crowd that they didn't have to take a "leap of faith" on her because they could "look at the record." 

Leaving aside the fact that the whole spouse-as-experience thing is a bit of a stretch (I hope to hell that the surgeons wielding scalpels in my local hospitals didn't get their jobs on the strength of their spouses' job performance), and the fact that HRC has only four years' Senate experience more and three years' total legislative experience less than BO, what happened to the "record" on NAFTA?  Suddenly her biographers' memory that she was secretly against it all along has become more salient than her frequent on-the-record support of it at least through her 2003 memoir, in which she called it one of "Bill's victories."

In 2003 it was "Bill's victory" and today it was "negotiated" by GHWB's administration and "pushed through Congress."  Help me out, HRC; which record am I supposed to be looking at again?