I've hung with Hillary as long as I can, despite generally preferring Obama's thoughtful approach to politics and policy (see the race speech from Philly). I was willing to stick with her in spite of Bill's racial comments and her trainwreck of a campaign. But after her no-longer-subtle race-baiting last week ("working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"), I can't stomach her any more. She is not going to win, and these tactics aren't anything but spiteful and divisive.But I have to respectfully disagree. I don't think the "hardworking white people" comment was a very apt thing to say for several reasons which I'll articulate later. However, I view the comment as a progressive step forward in racial politics. Here's Hillary's comment.
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."To refer to whites as "white Americans" is a very progressive thing in terms of American racial politics. For years, the media and whites in general have referred to whites in generic sounding but racially charged language as "normal Americans," "everyday Americans," the "mainstream," or just "Americans." In this language, to be white (middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) is to be mainstream, normal, and American. To be black, Hispanic, Asian, poor, or gay is to be exotic, outside the mainstream, and "not really" American. Americanism was for white people. Multi-culturalism was for everybody else.
There has been some comment about Hillary's "white Americans" remark reading non-whites out of America. Actually, it's the opposite. By referring to working-class whites as "white Americans," Hillary is reading white people into multi-cultural American. Just like there are African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and gay Americans, there are now white Americans. White people in general might be a majority but white people can be divided into many different groups and Hillary's comment treats working-class whites as a specific American subculture rather than generically American. Because Hillary's comment gets away from representing whites as generically "real" Americans, it represents a triumph of multi-culturalism and somewhat of a breakthrough in American political representation.
The real clumsiness in Hillary's formulation comes with the honorific "hard-working." To me, this is a class-oriented kind of remark in which Hillary is looking to praise working-class whites. So she calls them "working" or "hard-working." The comment comes off as exclusionary in the sense that Hillary can be seen as implying that either non-whites or Obama's highly educated white supporters in towns like Madison, Wisconsin, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Iowa City, Iowa or Morehead, Kentucky are not hard-working.
But I don't think that's the case. Instead, I believe that Hillary was looking for a way to include white working-class and non-college educated people into a language of specific praise from which they're normally excluded because of their relative lack of education, relatively low incomes, and relatively low political profiles (unless they're unionized). She didn't want to treat working-class whites generically as "regular" people the way white people are usually described. She wanted to praise them but ended up with a formulation that made everybody else sound lazy.
What I'd like to suggest is that Hillary was not being racially provocative but was instead being awkward and unskilled because she is plowing new ground in terms of political rhetoric. I believe that was also the case with a lot of the "racially-tinged" comments made by Hillary, Andrew Cuomo, and Ed Rendell (the exception was Bill Clinton's obnoxious comments after the South Carolina primary). Interestingly enough, the Hillary campaign has done a lot for multi-cultural politics in the United States even if they haven't succeeded in getting Hillary elected.
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Good analysis. The only thing I would add is that the rhetoric of "working Americans" and "hard-working" people can also obfuscate issues of social class, which I've noticed politicians of both parties avoid like the plague.
"Working Americans" and "middle Americans" pop up a lot in speeches come election time. Yet, they can apply to a poor white woman factory worker in Georgia as well as an upper middle class executive in Los Angeles; who doesn't "work," who doesn't think of themselves as being in the "middle" in some way. It's a very inclusive set of terms, but it also avoids dealing with economic inequities.
You'll be a Hillary apologist till the bitter end, won't you?
Hi Ric. Thanks for addressing my comment.
I like the way you call out what I refer to as "white privilege," i.e., a white person's ability to avoid thinking about his/her whiteness. If that is, in fact, what Hillary Clinton was trying to change with her remark, then that is remarkably progressive. But I think that is giving her way too much credit.
In fact, I think her comment breaks down grammatically another way.
She said: "Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again." This isn't a list of the different Americans whose support Obama is losing. She's talking about one group of Americans, and the way she identifies them is by equating "hard-working" with "white."
Perhaps it was just clumsy speech, but taken in context with the desperate straits her campaign is in and her efforts to trounce Obama in white (and let's face it, not exactly racially progressive) states like Kentucky and West Virginia, it smacks of race-baiting.
I can almost buy the argument that her words were just a clumsy attempt to say that working-class white people are turning away from Obama, but I cannot believe that this comment was an attempt to move our country beyond its "white equals normal" viewpoint. That would be too dramatic of a shift from her campaign's earlier rhetoric, and really, it just gives too much credit to an off-the-cuff (but very illuminating) comment.
-Amanda M.
Hillary is reading white people into multi-cultural America
I'll agree that Hillary wasn't being deliberately racist, but you're giving her too much credit here.
Hillary's comment was simply a continuation of the foolish Mark Penn strategy of dividing the electorate into finer and finer demographic categories (working class white voters without a college education). It has nothing to do with her view of America as a diverse society. It is entirely about campaign tactics (who do we focus on, who do we ignore).
I think this has been the fundamental flaw of the Clinton campaign and it appears so deeply ingrained in the thinking of her team that they've repeatedly alienated large segments of the Democratic base by publicly discussing it.
This is where "insignificant states" and "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock wearing, trust fund babies" comes from. It's where Geraldine Ferraro's nonsensical "luck black man" statement originated. It's why she didn't bother with caucus states (too many party activists) and it's why she gave up completely on black voters.
She conceded entire groups forgetting that in the end, all the votes count the same. Obama was able to win by 30, 40, 50 points in key races because she didn't contest them. Meanwhile he kept her wins small by drawing just enough of "her" voters.
Yet Ric still enables and carries water for her. Kinda sad, dontcha think?
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