Liberal pundits seem almost relieved by the McCain campaign’s final descent into hardcore bigotry and fear-mongering — finally, he is exactly as small a man as we always suspected, and the conservative movement is revealed for precisely as racist and stupid as we always knew. Well good for us. But something about the frenzy to declare McCain uniquely evil — the heir of George Wallace — stinks of self-delusion. I truly believe that conservatism, both as a movement and as an ideology, is fundamentally malign. But when it comes to these dirty attacks on Obama, it’s not the conservatism. It’s the white privilege. For nearly every under-handed strategy by McCain, we have an identical or extremely similar strategy employed by Clinton. Let’s count them off, shall we?
First, the easy ones. Clinton made Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko household names. Without her help, it’s not even entirely clear to me that McCain’s people would have found them or made them issues. So the guilt by association started with her. In some ways, she also pushed it harder — using debate time repeatedly to attack Obama on Louis Farrakhan (a Very Scary Black Man) and Reverand Wright (another VSBM) where McCain had to be pushed to play the same hand in the same context, and has in fact generally been more restrained on every count except Ayers.
Clinton also worked harder to other Obama and paint him as unAmerican. Mind you, in some ways she had to work harder to accomplish the same thing because Democratic candidates, unaccustomed to full-on race-baiting, haven’t established the detailed and relatively subtle code McCain has. But of course many of the memes McCain now uses to attack Obama using racist code words started during Clinton’s campaign and were employed by Clinton — the continuing use of the “black radical” trope, the “We don’t know who he is” argument, and unbelievable level of condescencion that never would have worked on a white man are just the beginning. You name it, Clinton did it first. One could even argue, quite credibly, that she created the playbook McCain has been using. Clinton herself very nearly admitted as much — saying at the time, through back-channels, that everything she was submitting Obama to, McCain would also do. This was her justification. But it expresses itself as a form of inter-party white solidarity.
But those are the obvious comparisons. Their rhetoric and strategies have also matched up in more specific and more obscure ways. The obsessive use of ACORN’s erroneous voter registrations in recent weeks by Republicans and the press serve as a way of delegitimizing any potential win for Obama and lay the groundwork for legal challenges to his victory. This, combined with the voter suppression tactics employed by the GOP nationwide and especially in swing states, is all designed to make the votes of the poor and black Americans to count for less. Clinton’s apparent use of voter suppression tactics in some primaries have not been investigated thoroughly enough that I can confidently say she did the same physically, but rhetorically — and this does matter, as it was the lifeblood of her campaign for the entire slog after Super Tuesday, the argument that gave her a leg to stand on — she did precisely the same thing by challenging the legitimacy of Obama’s wins in states with caucuses. She tried to make his actual votes count for less by arguing that of course black people would vote for him, and of course such and such state would go for him, and because this wasn’t counter-intuitive, it didn’t count. Obama’s only legitimate victory was Iowa, because that was surprising, because that involved winning over mostly white people. And therefore the white vote counts most and the black vote counts least — as usual.
This strategy, combined with the attempts to change the rules mid-game on Florida and Michigan, all worked to create the impression that Obama was illegitimate — that he could not be allowed to win. Clinton and her surrogates explicitly argued that Obama could not be allowed to win because his victory would be viewed as an act of thievery by the (entitled white) people who supported her. McCain has been making the same threat, and so have his surrogates. “If you win,” they’ve been saying, “We won’t let it count.” My friend and co-blogger John Cain, formerly a Clinton supporter himself, said in that time that Clinton was setting her supporters up to say “We wuz robbed.” A fringe among them still believes that. And McCain is stoking the sense of entitlement and rage in his constituents to lay the groundwork for the same attitude among them.
And there’s more. Many liberal writers have criticized McCain for employing surrogates who attack Obama using racialized terms. Josh Marshall suggested Joe the Plumber was perhaps being a bit of a racist when he discussed how well Obama can “tap dance.” We were all upset when Palin minimized Obama’s time as a community organizer, and when Republicans tried to turn that into a count against him, and when they described him as “a guy of the street,” but in every instance Clinton got there first. Her surrogates couldn’t help themsleves. They painted Obama as a thug, decried his past drug use, tried to turn his time as a community organizer against him and used it to paint him as a radical, and one of her surrogates described Obama’s rhetoric as a “shuck and jive” strategy.
Remember how racist and condescending we thought it was when McCain used the voice of a white woman to call Obama “disrespectful” for attacking Sarah Palin, another white woman, in nationally televized commercials? Remember how much it pissed us off when McCain argued, against all indications, that Obama simply didn’t understand fundamentals of government and leadership? Again, on every point, Clinton got there first: “Shame on you, Barack Obama.” She said that to him, herself, in person, during a debate. How’s that for condescending? How’s that for racism?
We could go on doing this all day. GOP mailers, advertisements, and McCain’s commercials, have all played with Obama’s appearance in various ways to draw attention to his “blackness.” Clinton did that first, darkening Obama’s skin in commercials. Clinton used the lapel pin attak first. Clinton created the rule that Obama had to denounce and reject every black man who ever said something bad or unpopular.
And while Clinton mostly kept her sense of entitlement in check in her own statements, her surrogates and her husband did not. Then as now, there was a sense — among her liberal supporters as well as in her campaign — that she shouldn’t even have to run against this guy, that he had no business in the campaign, that it was an insult to even have to compete with this guy. Who did he think he was?
And there is one measure in which Clinton is undeniably worse. While McCain’s campaign, the press, many blogs, and Clinton’s campaign have all bought into the narrative where Obama has a problem with “regular people” because white men support him in smaller numbers (though, it should be noted, his numbers among white men are nearly identical to those of Kerry and Gore) than they do McCain or did Clinton. However, there are basically two people of any importance who have made it explicit that “regular people” means “white people.” Those are Chris Matthews and Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly referred to her support among “hard working Americans, white Americans” in order to bolster the her campaign’s legitimacy even as she was losing by every measure that mattered. Many have argued that these were merely slips of the tongue, but McCain has managed to make it within weeks of the election without saying any such thing.
In every case, we see the seeds of McCain’s despicable campaign in Clinton’s, and in some cases Clinton was demonstrably worse in terms of her willingness to push racist attacks on Obama. Liberal writers and politicians have been desperate to forget this, both because Clinton’s supporters are an important part of Obama’s electoral coalition and because the basic liberal worldview rests at least in part on the entirely ridiculous belief that Republicans have a near-monopoly on bigotry. But of course they don’t.
The truth is that while conservatives are easily worse as a movement and certainly do more harm to black Americans and other minorities, most white liberals enjoy their white privilege just as much as do white Republicans. Because white Democrats are rarely forced to compete with black Democrats, it’s easy to miss this. But both Clinton and McCain are white people who have been forced, to their apparent shock and dismay, to actually compete with a black man. And their reactions to this unprecedented challenge to their privilege were nearly identical: prolonged, vicious, nearly musical roars of rage and disbelief, cloaked only by the thin veil of courtesy and decorum required by a national campaign for office.
I can accept, for pragmatic reasons, the existing political compact wherein we politely pretend Clinton’s display of privilege away for the sake of keeping her former supporters on Obama’s side of the polls. But there should come a time where white liberals admit to themselves, after this election has passed, that McCain was not alone in his shameful conduct. One of ours — in many cases, our favored candidate — did it first, did it (in some ways) worse, and, worst of all, did it while many of us watched in silence. We were complicit. And if we pretend that moment away, we will continue to be so.
Brothers and sisters, it’s not the conservatism. It’s the white privilege.
