By now you’ve heard that there’s a kerfuffle about race. You may be confused as to who started it and what’s been said, so let’s break it down.
OK. Saturday, January 5, there was a debate, where Senator Clinton told Senators Edwards and Obama that “we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.” Obama, the next day, began to incorporate this in to his speeches:
How have we made progress in this country? Look, did John F. Kennedy look at the moon and say ‘Ahhhh, it’s too far. We can’t do that. We need a reality check.’ Dr. King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. ‘You know, this Dream thing,it’s a false hope. We can’t expect equality. False hopes.’
Let me tell you something about hope. I do talk about hope quite a bit. Out of necessity. There is no odds maker who would have said that I would be standing here when I was born in 1961. My parents come from different corners of the planet. They separated when I was two, My father left my mother. Single mom raised me with my grandparents. Could only offer me love and education and hope.
Then Hillary was asked about it.
This comment sparked a fervor. Voices in the African-American community found the remark disparaging of Dr. King. Now, I don’t think Senator Clinton in any way meant it the way it came across. I do not think she intended to dismiss Dr. King or the civil rights movement. But, for someone campaigning on “35 years of experience,” she should know to choose her words more carefully. Here’s my problem with what she said:
Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do…
She’s correct here. However, Johnson was able to get this pushed through a still shell-shocked Congress only because Kennedy had been assassinated. In that case, I guess it really took a Communist sympathizer with a crazy accurate shot, or the CIA and Mafia, depending upon whom you believe, to bring about equality.
That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives, because we had a president who said ‘we’re going to do it,’ and actually got it done.
Uh huh… So, what you’re saying is the women’s suffrage movement had nothing to do with giving women the right to vote. That dream became a reality because Woodrow Wilson was President, right? It had nothing to do with a 60 year movement, or with the amendment coming up every year in Congress for 41 years, or with the admission of Wyoming (which allowed women to vote) as a State, or Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912 becoming the first national political party to have a plank supporting women suffrage. None of that matters, because Wilson was president when it was passed and ratified.
What a totally bizarre argument for the first serious female contender for the Presidency to make.
People were still smarting over the comments made by Bill Shaheen, so piled on to this came the MLK/LBJ gaffe (and let’s be honest, that’s what it was), and this quote by Bill Clinton:
This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.
Meant as a blanket dismissal of Obama’s standing, it pissed off a string of bloggers, radio hosts, politicians, and cable news shows. Bill even made a call to Al Sharpton’s radio show to “clarify.”
But feet just keep entering mouths in this case, with Andrew Cuomo saying of Iowa and New Hampshire:
You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.
The Guardian prints this quote from an anonymous Clinton “advisor:”
If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.
So that takes us from January 5 through January 10. There has been no response from the Obama campaign regarding this at this point. On January 11, we finally get a quote from spokesperson Candice Tolliver:
A cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements. There’s a groundswell of reaction to these comments–and not just these latest comments but really a pattern, or a series of comments that we’ve heard for several months. Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this really an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?
On January 13, Hillary Clinton went on Meet The Press, where she stated this:
Clearly, we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this.
And we’re off! Without a shred of evidence to back up this ludicrous claim, the media begin reporting that Obama and Clinton are now having “A Race War.” Obama speaks in a conference call with reporters on this issue for the first time:
Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn’t make the statement. I haven’t remarked on it. And she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that.
Later that very same day, at a rally in South Carolina, Bob Johnson, founder of BET, says the following when introducing Senator Clinton:
Bill and Hillary Clinton… [were] deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that… I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.
Which brings us full circle back to what Bill Shaheen was fired for a month ago. On January 14 it’s reported that the two campaigns “call a truce,” which is stupid, because Obama was never at war.
Ridiculous.
You can follow thew whole timeline here.
