The Campaign Trail (2)

No TV here in the country, so we check in periodically to CNN and NY Times online for election results. A victory/non-victory for Hillary Clinton last night in Nevada, attendant media spin about which victory – Clinton’s popular victory, or Obama’s delegate victory – counts more.

Last week, a Times Week in Review article about the “firsts” of this Democratic race – first woman, first black man. It’s weird to be a woman of color at this particular moment in history; identity politics are interestingly, disorientingly scrambled. An article speaking to this on today’s op-ed page: Whitney Terrell writes about living on the fault line between blacks and whites in his Kansas City, MO district, where the white senator endorses Obama and the black Congressman endorses Hillary Clinton. Terrell writes: “With bad times brewing, black voters seem worried they can’t afford to vote for Mr. Obama’s optimism and lose. ‘I like him,’ said one of my longtime neighbors. ‘I just don’t think anybody’s going to let him be president.’”

I have been frustrated (though not surprised, really) in finding the prevalence of this sentiment among fellow people of color. My two most intense and ongoing conversations about Democratic politics right now are with two close friends, one a black woman, one an Asian American woman. F. is black, born and bred in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, loved/loves Bubba, and has been a Hillary supporter all along. She is cautiously glad to see Obama’s ascent as a viable candidate, but isn’t a supporter (yet). She’s expressed a conviction that he will be “eaten alive” by the white political establishment on the political level, along with worry for his basic safety, on the physical survival level. “It ain’t gonna happen,” she has said. “There’s just no way a white country is going to let a black man be president.” And if they do, (she implies), it ain’t gonna be pretty. She says it in a you silly girl kind of way, in a you don’t know what I know kind of way. I respect that – that I don’t know what she knows about being black in America; but I’m frustrated still, because who are “they” if not “us”? We are voters, and black people are voters, not to mention participants in a democracy that, it seems to me, is desperately trying to revive itself, make itself real again, via the Obama candidacy. Of course Obama won’t get elected if skeptical/fearful black people vote for the elite/perceived-powerful white woman! But this feeling, that Obama – that hope in an optimistic black candidacy cannot be “afforded” – this is what I think is hugely at stake in this election.

S. was the most radical idealist I knew back in our college days. And she wasn’t just talk either – she has worked in Palestinian refugee camps, Mother Teresa’s home in India, and has done death penalty defense work in Alabama (she’s an attorney). For years, she rejected the institution of marriage. Until… she met her current husband. They now have two little boys, and she’s frantic with child care and financial responsibility and sleep deprivation. I was shocked (and yet sort of not, because I now have so many friends with small children, I am learning the all-consumingness of it) – to hear her say that she was voting Hillary, and for this reason: “I don’t want any idealism or ideology, I just want someone who can manage the office, do the job.” In her voice, I could hear her exhaustion, her I’m-just-trying-to-get-through-the-day exasperation with “ideas” and “hope.” Again, Obama seemed an expensive luxury to her.

[Interesting that no one is worried about Hillary, as a woman, getting eaten alive. I suspect that having Bubba by her side as her bouncer is no small factor.]

Youthful idealism specialist Dave Eggers (author of (mark the ironic but not ironic youth-inspired title) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) writes, on that same op-ed page:

How can hope be false? the young idealist might ask. Hope is the only horse these young people have in the race. And wasn’t it the other Clinton who liked to quote from “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” which seems ludicrously apt right about now?

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

Both tactically and substantively speaking, I think Obama would do well to invoke Dr. King, emphatically and often. There was nothing that seemed more unaffordable to black Americans in the ‘60’s than non-violence, forgiveness, conciliation; but, as only an effective leader can, he sold those impossible luxuries to his movement as both ideal and strategy: do this because your dignity and humanity are at stake; do this because it will work. Dr. King wasn’t perfect, but he was more right – and more leader – than any major American public figure in the last 40 years. He made world-changing activists out of raging, downtrodden citizens, made them to understand that what seemed most unaffordable was exactly what they could not afford to reject.