Tethered Swimming

The very real possibility of Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic nominee, a prospect that I considered little more than a media fantasy until the New Hampshire and Nevada results came back, has frightened me into liking Barack Obama a lot more than I used to. His win yesterday in South Carolina did a lot to ease my mind. His campaign looked very good in victory and while no one knows what is going to happen next Tuesday the newly explicit focus on racial politics is immensely to his advantage, not only in South Carolina but nationwide as well.

Last year Bill O’Reilly went to a restaurant in Harlem and got into a little hot water for basically saying out loud what a lot of his audience probably thinks, “Golly gee, when these negroes are well behaved they’re just like us!” A great many white people in this country view racism, of the black people vs white people variety, as something which has been adequately addressed. You can see this attitude in everything from lawsuits about the racial makeup of classrooms (from kindergarten to graduate school) to the drunken ramblings of those South Carolina frat boys in the Borat movie to Stephen Colbert’s trenchant running gag about not being able to see race.

Most of the time I see the phrase “white guilt” deployed it’s under the assumption that such guilt is unjustified. Not just on an individual level either, but that white people as a group no longer have anything to feel guilty about. “Silly white liberals”, the conservative line of thought goes, “Still feeling bad for things that happened decades or centuries ago.” The underlying assumption behind that line of thinking is that racism is a minor problem that causes little more than inconvenience. After all, the two biggest legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, have now been on the books for more than four decades. To white people living in white neighborhoods with kids in white schools black people are out of sight and out of mind.

For the most part that ignorance isn’t willful; it’s just the natural result of the human reluctance to face unpleasant truths. Obama and his candidacy force topics of conversation that most white people, liberal and conservative, would rather avoid. Once you can no longer ignore racism you have to face the fact that it is still very real and still has very damaging effects on the lives of millions of American citizens. When undeniable problems (the overt racism of the war on drugs, the scandalous neglect of minority education, disenfranchisement, etc) break through the clutter of modern life and really make themselves widely known it can make a lot of people feel the need to do something.

Even if that something is as trivial as bothering to go and vote it can help Obama break through the apathy behind our low turnout rates. People that don’t vote have been a glittering prize in the eyes of politicians and their henchmen for decades. But they’ve remained theoretical with such stubbornness that they’ve become the Keyser Soze of politics. Nobody considered serious really believes in them, but they still scare the shit out of professional politicos because you just never know. Precisely because of his skin color Obama can elicit more excitement than any other candidate and if he can make even a little bit of the prophecy of the non-voter come true not only will he win the nomination, but he’ll will in a landslide in November.

White guilt is not some form of non-monetary reparations for past injustices like slavery. It’s guilt about ongoing racial disadvantages. Racism is generally seen through the lens of how bad it is for minorities, here’s how many black men are in prison, here’s how much more black people pay for loans, here’s how much lower test scores are, ad nauseam. But what doesn’t get mentioned as often is that white people are therefore advantaged. The advantages (lighter punishments for lawbreaking, easier career advancement, etc) are overwhelmingly outweighed by the damage that racism does to society as a whole, but they exist nonetheless. Because those advantages go to all white people, regardless of their politics or situation, it means that all white people are beneficiaries of racism and that is something to which guilt is an appropriate reaction.

Hillary would be capable of the same kind of appeal if her last name was Rodham or Smith or anything other than Clinton. If her husband was merely some lawyer or even had just topped out as governor of Arkansas, she would be able to make the same claims about being transformative that Obama does. It would be exciting, something genuinely new under the sun, to have a female president. But in the eyes of many Hillary is a Clinton first and a woman second. Her campaign has presented her as the Third Clinton Term that so many would’ve preferred to the Bush Restoration. But in doing so it sacrifices the advantages of running as a woman while still bearing the disadvantages.

It’s not like sexism isn’t still with us, but there is no “male guilt”. Maybe that’s because sexism is more acceptable than racism, but maybe it’s because no national political figure has ever tried to exploit it. Most men don’t think about the disadvantages and lost opportunities for women any more than most white people think about the disadvantages and lost opportunities for minorities.

Setting aside the issue of who has it tougher in life and politics, black people or women, the simple fact is that Obama has turned his novel status as a minority candidate to his advantage. Hillary hasn’t even tried. The closest she came was the tearless but emotional incident in New Hampshire and it resulted in her first victory. Despite its recent race based attacks the Clinton campaign has been extraordinarily timid in its strategy. Hillary and her surrogates aren’t talking about the wage gap between men and women, or domestic violence, or even something as non-controversial as Third World female genital mutilation. They’re on record as thinking that she has to appear tough and masculine to some extent because a more feminine campaign would cost them votes. They may be right about that, but the fact that they’re openly asking the question displays a shocking lack of faith in the electorate as well as a shortage of confidence in their campaign.

The accepted political wisdom is that a Hillary Clinton campaign with more emphasis on gender issues is a loser. The press and her campaign brain trust think that that is not what the public wants to see from her. But I’m not so sure. On issues of tolerance and diversity, from interracial romance to accepting homosexuals, the public is usually ahead of the press, and way ahead of the government. The success of the Obama campaign in the more racialized political environment of the last couple of weeks has shown that the public is willing to see not being a white male as an advantage. By running as Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary has sacrificed whatever benefits gender politics have to offer her while still bearing the costs.

Obama can lay the most credible claim to being a genuinely revolutionary candidate. He can convince people that he can change the way politics is practiced in this country because he is, forgive the term, his own man. Hillary Clinton isn’t her own woman, she’s a serious candidate only because of who her husband is. She’s not even the preferred half of the team. Clinton voters in New Hampshire would’ve voted for her husband instead of her by a fourteen point margin.

The conventional assumption is that Clinton is running a tougher campaign than Obama. Clinton talks about making hard compromises while Obama hides behind his foolish hope that nice language will make the Republicans behave like grownups. But the opposite is true, it is Obama who is running the bold campaign. In the tradition of many successful politicians he is promising a lot, but people like to be promised things. The politics of hope did well yesterday, among white people and black people. Here’s hoping he keeps it up and hey, in 2016 maybe there will be a candidate willing to run as a woman instead of as a wife.