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At
approximately
6 p.m. on January 15, three hours before a “Kumbaya” interlude at
the Democratic presidential debate in
Las
Vegas, I saw Al Sharpton defending Sen. Barack Obama
from charges of youthful drug abuse.
As we
all know by now, the accusation arises from Obama’s own
admission in his modern Horatio Alger tale Dreams
From My Father, published long before he became a
presidential candidate, that he tried cocaine as a
teenager.
The
hoopla over this has validated the judgment of George W.
Bush eight years ago to refuse to answer questions about
his own alleged drug use, which many believe continued
well beyond his teen years. This is why honesty isn’t
considered the best policy by political consultants. But
I digress.
Sharpton
has done things to redeem himself in recent years, but
his presence is a one-way ticket back to Tawana Brawley,
boycotts, shakedowns and good old-fashioned,
in-your-face confrontational race-based politics. Seeing
him in that box on TV, I realized that the
Clintons
had done what they needed to do to stop Obama’s historic
surge in its tracks.
From the
start of his career, Obama wanted—and needed—to remove
the race card from the political deck. While it isn’t
clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is
likely it wasn’t from the person with the most to lose.
If
Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at
Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But
four shots constitute a pattern, with Clinton’s former
New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Rep. Charles
Rangel,
Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television
founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act.
Going
too far
Surrogates don’t take printed instructions, but neither
do they want to upset the candidate they’ve traveled to
the hinterlands to please. And Penn isn’t even a
surrogate. He’s the campaign’s top strategist.
In the
middle of the drug pile-on,
Clinton,
desperate after her Iowa defeat, went too far when
trying to imprint the message that Obama is all talk and
no action. She infelicitously compared Martin Luther
King Jr. to former President Lyndon Johnson.
“Dr.
King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon
Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” she said.
In
fairness to the
Clintons, even masters of the game trip up when the crown believed to
be theirs slips out of reach. They had just hours to
convince folks in
New
Hampshire that the guy who Iowans had fallen in love
with was wrong for them.
Red-faced rant
Bill
Clinton, in particular, was furious at Hillary’s loss,
indulging in the kind of red-faced rants vividly
described in George Stephanopoulos’s tale of White House
life, All Too Human.
How dare
this upstart backbencher steal this election from
Hillary! The press? What a lazy bunch of enablers
swallowing this &%*# fairy tale, all this hooey about
what we share being so much greater than our
differences.
Any
thought that Bill would be less active in New Hampshire
was shelved. In 1992 Hillary helped Bill become the
“Comeback Kid” in the Granite State after a lounge
singer gave a press conference about an affair. Now it
was his chance to return the favor.
But they
were a bit off in choosing to mention an
African-American idealist (King as Obama) in
juxtaposition with a tough pragmatist who can get things
done (LBJ as herself). The two campaigns fanned the
flames and cable TV poured on the kerosene, booking the
usual suspects to chew it all over. By Monday morning,
the Democrats were in danger of becoming as divided as
Republicans.
Convenient ceasefire
A
cease-fire initiated by Obama was formalized into a
peace agreement during a love fest at the debate. And
why not? For Clinton’s campaign, it was “mission
accomplished,” intentional or not. Obama was now the
black candidate. There had been minimal blowback and
only a minor casualty (Shaheen resigned).
For
Obama, he lost the essence of his candidacy as the first
black man to run as himself. Once the race card is on
the table, no matter who puts it there, it’s impossible
to put it back up anyone’s sleeve. Obama may look back
on the first two weeks of 2008 as the time when he lost
the nomination to Clinton.
At the
height of the controversy on Sunday, Clinton repeated
her paean to King from her book Living History. She’d
been taken to hear “this phenomenon known as Dr. King”
by her youth minister and remembered his plea to awaken
to “the great revolution that the civil-rights pioneers
were waging.”
No one’s
doubting
Clinton’s belief in equality, but however much she was moved,
Hillary became a Goldwater Girl. And Sen. Barry
Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Her
journey to embrace civil rights is proof that anyone can
grow up. But maybe not to be president.
****
Margaret Carlson, author of Anyone Can Grow Up: How
George Bush and I Made It to the White House and former
White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a
Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her
own. |
