Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Obama-Clinton-McCain Paradoxes   [Victor Davis Hanson]

Part of the problem with discussing race, Obama’s middle name, his wife’s astounding proclamations, and all the rest is perhaps remembering that there are two different constituencies, his base and the country, that require an Obama two-step.

No doubt having a middle name like Hussein was ‘cool’ at Columbia and Harvard where it might solidify one’s ethnic or exotic fides. By the same token, a well-paid, Ivy-League-educated African-American woman like Michelle Obama, of course, had considerable success in lecturing upscale elite liberal audiences on their sloth, or cynicism, or why one should not heretofore have pride in the United States, or why America was a mean place. And a bumper-sticker African-American identify was advantageous in the Ivy League for Obama, and essential for success in local districted Chicago politics.

But once one slowly metamorphosizes from a state politician to a liberal Illinois senator to the purported Democratic nominee, then all of those self-embraced identities that deliberately emphasize, rather than play down, race and culture can become polarizing to a wider constituency — and must be as muffled by the candidate as they are emphasized by his opportunistic opponents.

So now we are in this silly situation, in which at one time Obama was happy enough to remind some that his middle name was Hussein and now it is a slur for other less well-intentioned to do so; in which his wife’s browbeating of America was salve to guilty liberals and now it is considered illiberal to question her assumptions; in which a candidate who rose to prominence as a “black” candidate and garners majority margins of 90% among African-American against a very liberal female opponent insists that he has transcended race and to suggest otherwise is, well, racist.

Nothing is new in all this: all candidates expand beyond their base and try to play down their former zealotry, on issues as diverse as abortion to guns to gay rights. But what is unique is that the usual flak that meets a politician’s readjustments and opportunism in the case of Obama is additionally questioned as being racist or at least insensitive.

A final irony is that Clinton, Inc. made careers on playing up America’s supposed unfairness and insensitivity to a variety of aggrieved groups, and Hillary, as a powerful professional woman par excellence, was prepared to ride that victim horse all the way to the Presidency. But suddenly her offer to Obama of the VP spot is seen as racial condescension, the white girl in the commercial when the 3 AM phone call comes is said to be subtly racist, exegesis about who got Civil Rights legislation enacted is derided as inappropriate, and on and on. In short, the Clintons have been completely Clintonized, and when they turn to the media for their accustomed help, as in the past against the Right Wing Attack Machine — they learn it has become a Left-Wing Attack machine and directed at them!

McCain may become a proper antidote for all this. Unlike the verbose Michelle Obama, he really has suffered in his life; unlike Barack Obama he really has reached across the aisle and paid a price for it; and unlike Obama's promises of transparency, he really does talk in specifics and bluntly rather than in mellifluous platitudes. And as for an against-the-odds candicacy, in postmodern America a 71-year-old survivor of communist torture and malignant melonoma seems to match the narrative of a young Ivy-League graduate of mixed ancestry.

03/12 01:51 PMShare