Where He Is Today
So. Geraldine Ferraro is stepping down from her role in the Clinton campaign after her public statements that “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is,” began to sound just a wee bit racist.
The Clintons are working a tricky dance, deliberately appealing to racists while trying to avoid looking like they’re deliberately appealing to racists, which would lose more votes among the general electorate than it would gain among the Archie Bunkers. This ugly tactic was once meat and potatoes for southern Democrats until LBJ rightly drove it from the party, at which point Republicans were happy to sup with the devil over this particular dish, building a successful coalition on Nixon’s “law and order,” Regan’s “welfare mothers,” and Bush the elder’s Willy Horton campaign. Working to create racial divisions within the party is a betrayal of its ideals, and incidentally hurts the Democratic party by alienating voters who might otherwise rally around candidates for offices other than president. It is deeply shameful. None of this does not appear to bother the Clintons, who blacks once viewed as champions, but Senator Clinton is savvy enough to realize that she can’t be seen making such statements herself, so she makes them by proxy: through regional campaign managers, through Bill, through Ferraro. That way, if the public takes right and proper umbrage at racist innuendo, she can deny the statement, or, if pressed, throw her proxy under the bus, as she did Ferraro…after waiting long enough for the innuendo to enter the national discussion, of course.
Ferraro refuses to apologize, instead insisting that others should apologize to her for taking her statement out of context (which it wasn’t), and painting it as racist (which it is). She nonetheless stepped down from her participation as a major fundraiser for the Clinton campaign. Clinton recognizes the damage Ferraro’s statement does, even if Ferraro won’t.
Still, I hear Clinton supporters defending Ferraro by pulling the “Well, it’s literally true, isn’t it?” line. I suppose. In the context of the statement, of course, Obama’s race has been a hindrance, not an unfair advantage—dark skin might help win a seat in some inner-city ward of some metropolis, but it doesn’t help on the national scene, nor in white-bread Illinois state, nor, I think, even in Chicago, which has elected precisely one black mayor. If Obama has succeeded, it is despite his race, and by some combination of political savvy, skillful oratory, and legislative performance, all of which are assets, and not because of it. But in the vague, solipsistic sense that we are all the product of a lifetime’s accumulation of inborn traits, experiences, and external perceptions of us, Obama might in some sense “not be in this position” if he looked different, had been born in different circumstances, belonged to a different demographic.
Okay, so Ferraro’s statement is true in its most literal sense. Now that that’s established, I’m sure we can look forward to Clinton supporters cheerfully agreeing that Hillary Clinton is only where she is by virtue of being married to Bill. Isn’t that precisely the message she’d like spread across the headlines?