The Democrats and the race card

The Wall Street Journal discusses how the sniping on race that has been going back and forth between the Clinton and Obama campaigns has been an inevitable consequence of the Democrats' endless playing of the race card.

Let's leave aside how this exchange undermines each candidates' claims that he or she would unite the country rather than divide it like the "polarizing" President Bush. On the merits, Mrs. Clinton obviously is correct. It did take a President's signature to bring the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to fruition. And the idea that saying so takes anything away from King's legacy is absurd.

Were she a true uniter, however, Mrs. Clinton might have added that the Civil Rights Act took bipartisanship as well, thanks to fierce opposition from Southern Democrats. Republicans of that era are often portrayed as opponents of civil rights. In fact, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the 1964 bill. And when it finally passed, GOP Senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader who worked closely with the bill's sponsor, Democrat Hubert Humphrey, was honored for his efforts with a NAACP civil rights award.

Democrats never miss an opportunity to play the race card against Republicans and even black conservatives like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who dare to dissent from liberal orthodoxy. So it's tempting to enjoy the political entertainment value of a race-based dust up between Senators Clinton and Obama.

But there's also a cautionary tale here in how identity politics can come back to bite. The left's color-by-numbers approach to attracting votes has essentially painted the Democrats into a corner, making it very difficult for them to prevail in national elections without winning nearly every black vote. The result is the very antithesis of what King fought for -- an over-reliance on blunt racial appeals instead of issues and ideas.

Both campaigns have called for a cooling off on the race rhetoric. It's hurt Hillary in particular among black voters and Obama has been trying to rise above being characterized as the "black candidate." And by Obama calling for a ceasefire first, he can recapture a bit of his message as being above partisan bickering.

Of course, typically for the Clintons, they swear off attacks on one hand and then one of their supporters, Charlie Rangel, just happens to get in one last jab.

Strikingly, though, one of Clinton's supporters, New York Rep. Charles Rangel, was sharply critical of Obama in an interview during the day. "How race got into this thing is because Obama said 'race,'" Rangel, the dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, said on television station NY1.

As David Brooks notes today, both Obama and Clinton are playing the "identity card" that Democrats have used against conservatives for years. Whether it be gender or racial identity, they're playing for whatever advantages being the first to have a realistic possibility of becoming the president their membership in that identity group gives them. But now when they attack, they have to attack each other rather than a conservative. And the result isn't pretty.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill [sic Ward Connerly] and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Clinton is suffering most. She is now accused, absurdly, of being insensitive to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bill Clinton’s talk of a “fairy tale,” which was used in the context of the Iraq debate, is now being distorted into a condemnation of the civil rights movement. Hillary Clinton finds that in attacking Obama, she is accused of being hostile to the entire African-American experience.

Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

Huh?

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities.

....This is the logical extreme of the identity politics that as been floating around this country for decades. Every revolution devours its offspring, and it seems the multicultural one does, too.

The final two points I’d make are: First, this whole show seems stale and deranged to the younger set, as Obama and Clinton seemed to recognize when they damped down the feud yesterday afternoon. The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.