The Smoking Gun

"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88. And he ran a good campaign."
-- Bill Clinton today, when asked by a reporter what it said about Obama that it "took two people to beat him."

There isn't a lot one needs to say about this. It's not difficult to imagine any number of possible legitimate responses to the baiting question asked of Bill Clinton by the reporter, responses that might have sidestepped the racially divisive tone that has overshadowed the Democratic debate recently, particularly with respect to the South Carolina primary. That he chose instead to widen the divide I find enormously disappointing.

Early returns indicate that Barack Obama has won a strong victory in South Carolina, and that South Carolina's white male voters have not voted in a particularly race-conscious manner, results which, if they hold, provide their own evidence of repudiation in this modern election of the sort of regressive rhetoric that has resurfaced in recent weeks. I will confess to any South Carolinian who might chance across this blog entry that I was prepared to be more concerned about the maturity of the voters in your state than perhaps I need to be. I am very pleased when any voter selects the candidate of her choice without regard to racial or sexual differences, but by the job qualifications of that candidate. I can only hope that criteria dominates in the remaining primaries as we go forward.

News reports that are responded to in haste, as I've done in this case, can of course come back to bite the responder. There's always the possibility that some context was not provided that would have completely altered the tenor of an exchange. I will be surprised if much new information surfaces to shed more light on Mr. Clinton's response above, and I very much expect that those words are about to haunt the Clintons for the rest of their lives.

I still support Barack Obama, and of course, it has nothing to do with his color. I don't believe he's the perfect candidate, but I do believe he has exceptional intelligence, skills and sensibilities to bring to the office of the presidency in 2009. I have nonetheless continued to hope that Senator Clinton would display more sensitivity to the concerns of progressives such as I believe myself to be, especially since she's still, for the moment, the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. Now that her husband has scraped the bottom of the ethical barrel in South Carolina, some things are going to shift, and we're going to learn some important things about ourselves in the next few weeks.

The vast majority of Americans polled as to whether America is ready for a President who is not a white male have responded in the affirmative, whether that candidate is a black or a woman. That's a great step forward in America, and it's not something we can afford to take for granted. We have seen too often already in this 21st century that the wheels of progress can be reversed. We have a duty to be vigilant if we want to advance the cause of fairness in our society. We have seen that fairness does not require us to lower our sights (something I've been thinking about in depth for future comments), and we've found that our sights get lowered for us if we're inattentive. Now, the stakes in this area have been raised, and I think we're going to have to confront it to go forward.

Bill Clinton cannot be given a free pass for his comment. He has removed all ambiguity from all the somewhat more artfully disguised allusions made previously. There has been a blatant attempt to return our consciousness to the destructive infections that have blinded us until so recently. It's been a deeply damaging effort by the Clintons, and deeply unfair. I hope that we all grow out of the neuroses we've fallen back into as quickly as possible, and learn from this experience across the board. I want to move on just as soon as everyone shows me they're ready.