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Unable to go through a day without holding a conference call, the Clinton campaign put Deputy Communications Director Phil Singer and Senior Adviser Harold Ickes on the phone to talk about Florida and Michigan today. Right off the bat, Ickes asserted that if Democrats don't find a way to hold a revote in Michigan, Democratic voters will be disenfranchised because the delegates probably won't be seated at the convention. As Yoda suggests, disenfranchisement leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Suffering leads to losing the White House.
Ickes claims that without their delegation seated, Michigan Democrats won't vote for the party's nominee in November. If that happens, he said it would be hard to put together 270 electoral votes in November. (270 is the majority needed to win the presidency.) The problem: Ickes is wrong--in one set of polls, Clinton hits 270 without Michigan.
SurveyUSA's monstrous polling project surveyed 30,000 people nationwide and then used state-by-state results in hypothetical matchups to figure out which Democrat would win more electoral votes against John McCain. Obama nabbed more than Clinton against McCain, but Clinton still won the White House. She did it by winning Florida, but losing Michigan.
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It’s become the accepted logic of this race that if a surrogate says the wrong thing, you "denounce and reject" them, fire them from your campaign, return their money, and toss your drink in their face at parties. Until today.
Don’t get me wrong, Obama slammed Wright’s words. He denounced the reverend’s use of "incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."
But Obama refused to throw Wright under the bus. (Wright did sever his official ties to the campaign, however.) Instead, Obama distinguished between the words and the man. That doesn’t seem particularly new—smart people are often forgiven for saying dumb things. But the assumption in this election has been that if someone embarrasses you, they have to go. No exceptions. Geraldine Ferraro, Samantha Power, Bob Johnson, Bill Shaheen—so many people got axed along the way that rejection became the norm. Hillary Clinton immortalized the rule by insisting in a debate that Obama "reject and denounce" Louis Farrakhan, who had praised Obama.
By defending Wright, you could say Obama rejected the Reject-and-Eject Rule. Instead, he executed a deft rhetorical pivot: All at once, he distanced himself from Wright's words, embraced Wright as a person, and held him up as an example of the American attitudes that need changing. For the past week, his campaign worried that people would see Wright as representing Obama. So Obama flipped the story, arguing that Wright actually represents America. A flawed, twisted America, but a real one nonetheless. He sums up the trouble with Wright like this:
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of [its] own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
Notice how he incorporates Wright’s own quote—"the audacity of hope"—into the prescription for his (and America’s) own rehabilitation.
The idea behind Obama’s speech is that some remarks, and therefore some people, are too complex simply to accept or reject. He cast Wright not quite as a victim but as a product of his times: "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years." To simply reject Wright would be to neglect the root causes behind his words. Obama always talks about ushering in a new kind of politics—the reject-and-eject rule can be the first assumption to go.
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In today’s big-deal Obama speech, he offered a smattering of memorable quotes on how he was going to unify a country that is deeply split along regional, racial, and religious fault lines. But for all that talk of unity, he never discussed how he planned to bridge the generation gap.
Obama said the word generation 15 times in today’s speech—with its context ranging between a reverence for past generations’ heroism and a disappointment that they can’t let go of their pasts. In the trickiest passage of today’s speech, Obama defended his Reverend-in-Chief James Jeremiah Wright* with accolades about Wright’s service in the marines and his 30 years of community service. According to Obama, Wright erred by getting bogged down in the politics of his generation. “For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years,” Obama said.
The generational argument offered Obama his best escape plan for wriggling out of the Wright quagmire. If he threw his family friend and spiritual adviser under the bus, he’d look like a scheming politician. If he embraced Wright in his darkest hour, he wouldn’t assuage concerns that he, too, wanted to damn America. So instead Obama designed an excuse for Wright’s actions—Wright is too old to understand the country’s current racial positioning, and his generation’s past clouds the country’s future. Obama’s pathos has always claimed to be the answer to this age-group fiction. The spin: Only Obama and his unique American story can transcend the culture-war murkiness.
It’s an argument Andrew Sullivan has already made at length—and it’s one that makes sense if you’re a young Obama fan. Past generations haven’t seemed to get the job done, and Obama is (arguably) the first politician of Generation X to run for president. Therefore, Obama is a better option than John McCain. McCain is so old, the thinking goes, that his generation taught Bush and Clinton’s generation how to be a generation. That’s no way to bring about change.
But even if he soothes the country’s racial rifts, he may create a new one in its place. All of this talk about Obama transcending our nation’s past harms an innocent bystander—old people. Senior citizen Democrats already like Hillary Clinton more than Obama. If identity politics hold through the general election, they’re likely to prefer McCain over Obama, as well. Rather than pander to what may be a crippling weakness, Obama is headed the other direction. His heavy reliance on generational rhetoric in today’s speech and his crochety-old-uncle excuse for Wright only highlights his efforts.
After he won South Carolina’s primary Obama said, “I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina, I saw South Carolina.” Seventeen percent of South Carolina voters were over 65. Seniors favored Clinton over Obama by eight points. The state favored Obama over Clinton by 28 points.
Ironically, Obama's willingness to break free from past generation's mentalities pays tribute to the politician Obama most resembles—John F. Kennedy. In JFK's inaugural address, he said:
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
The torch has been passed to Obama, but he may end up burning too many bridges to use it.
*UPDATE 2:49 p.m.: I originally misidentified Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as James Wright.
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Just a thought as we’re waiting for Obama to deliver his much-anticipated
speech on race.
NBC's First Read says
that this speech is make-or-break for Obama: “If Obama can't hit a homerun on
this speech today, then he won’t be president.” Sorry, what?? It’s one thing to say this will be a big speech. It’s
another to say his candidacy hinges on it. He has an insurmountable pledged
delegate lead, and the odds of Clinton
overtaking him with superdelegates are slipping.
Plus, Obama still
beats McCain in head-to-head match-ups. The idea that Obama could suddenly sabotage
his own candidacy with a single speech like this neglects the fact that he’s,
er, winning.
First Read also concludes that the Wright controversy has
“hurt Obama – so far.” The evidence: a new poll shows Clinton beating McCain by more points (five)
than Obama does (two). Before the Wright flap dominated news cycles, Obama had
a wider lead over McCain than Clinton
did. But to chalk that switch up to Wright alone seems questionable, especially
since we’re talking about a wide margin
of error:
Gallup
surveyed 685 "likely" voters across the nation from Friday through
Sunday. It says the margin of error on each result is +/- 4 percentage points.
That means neither Clinton nor Obama's lead in the new poll is "outside"
that margin. Clinton's
support could be as low as 47% (because 51-4=47) and McCain's could be as high
as 50% (because 46+4=50).
Something to keep in mind during post-speech analysis, too.
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