Raising the Racial Sludge

Josh Marshall (of TPM fame) has an interesting take on the relation between Geraldine Ferraro's comments and the Hillary Clinton campaign in an article for The Hill.

But the simple fact is that we wouldn’t be seeing this stuff now if it weren’t for the fact that this is the kind of campaign Hillary Clinton’s staff has decided to wage — often directly and at other times indirectly by not reining it in among her supporters when it crops up on its own. Wright is news today because Ferraro was news in the days just previous. Are her comments racist? That’s a loaded word. And there have been cases where the Clinton team has gotten a bum rap on these matters. What I do know, however, is that Clinton’s campaign and her surrogates have injected the subject of Obama’s race into this campaign too many times now for it to be credible to believe that it is anything but a conscious strategy.

In other words, Marshall isn't sure that Ferraro's comments were racist but does believe that the Hillary is injecting race into the campaign in a way that constantly reminds voters that Obama is "the black candidate."

My view is the polar opposite. Sure racism is a loaded word, but it applies well to Ferraro's comments about Obama being ahead because he's black and she herself being attacked because she's white. When Ferraro said that Obama is ahead because he's black, she was (knowingly I believe) dredging up the racist idea that blacks have become a "favored group" in American society or that blacks can only be successful because of affirmative action. My mother, a Democrat who's even more disgusted with Obama's success than Ferraro, expresses an allied racist idea when she claims that "blacks are taking over everything."

If either Hillary or Obama had gotten farther out ahead, this kind of racist sludge wouldn't have been dredged up from the depths of the segregationist past. However, the white racism was always there and the hard-fought character of the primary battle is bring it up.

But is the Hillary Clinton campaign specifically seeking to dredge up these kinds of white supremacist sentiments by continually reminding voters that Obama is black?

If they were, they would be worse than bigots because they would be trying to stimulate bigotry for political advantage. That would put the Hillary people disgusting in a Karl Rove kind of way.

But I don't think that's the case.

If Hillary Clinton herself or the Hillary campaign were seeking to "inject" racial poison into the campaign, they would have arranged for Bill Clinton to keep making racial remarks after his analogy between Obama and Jesse Jackson served to stereotype Obama as the "black candidate."

In fact, the opposite happened. Bill Clinton was given a new set of talking points, sent off on a Dan Quayle type tour of small towns, and became generally less prominent in Hillary's campaign.

That's a sign that Hillary didn't like the fact that Bill's comments and didn't like the fact that his comments drove African-American voters into the Obama camp.

I've argued several times that much of the Clinton campaign's maladroitness on race comes from their general lack of skill in dealing with African-American audiences and issues. That's because Hillary's staff is largely white and the general clumsiness of whites in dealing with non-whites rather than beinga specific strategy.

The Hillary campaign's problem with race is their whiteness rather than their white racism.