Finally, the Democratic presidential campaign has gone back to basics: identity. Whereas Republican identity politics center on claims to the Reaganite inheritance, to god, small taxes, and big weapons, Democrats are more inclined to obsess over gender and race. At the moment, the Clinton and Obama campaigns are fixated on the latter. There are historical reasons for this: southern whites abandoned the Democratic party over the pro-civil rights legislation of the mid-60s (more on that later); hence, the black vote is an essential component of any Democratic "southern strategy." But the reason today is that South Carolina (in which the majority of registered Democrats are black) is the next primary battleground.
Rather than rehash the terms of the current clash over the proper way to speak about Martin Luther King Jr., I'll wander over other topics. On King, this much can be said: he is one of the three saints of Democratic party politics: Martin, John (Kennedy), and Bobby (Kennedy) (more on John later). Hence it is important for both campaigns to commemorate King in an effort to align with his "legacy." One might ask why Clinton would keep the dispute over King alive, when there are clearly risks of committing a racial "offense." I have no idea what is the real intention in this, but clearly it has had this positive effect (from the standpoint of the take-no-prisoners Clintonistas): it drags Obama into the muck of political trench warfare which he so far has assiduously avoided, and it raises the racial stakes for Obama. What are these stakes? They are two-fold. First, Obama's own "racial authenticity" can become a political issue in a highly racialist black community and, second, it may force Obama to engage more directly in racial politics, an engagement that would jeopardize his ability to claim the standpoint of the national universal as the candidate of "unity." Hence, the risks are actually more significant for Obama than for Clinton, who already has a solid bloc of black supporters.
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What is of more interest to me is the continued invocation of one of the three saints, JFK. Bill Clinton claimed his entry into politics came through meeting JFK. Obama has situated his candidacy in relation to JFK as well, and the media has made inevitable comparisons of the two youthful, optimistic Senators. JFK is useful since the memory of the murdered prince of Camelot evokes the memory of tragedy and of promise. The tragedy of his assassination cut short the promise of his presidency. And, of course, JFK was a Democrat (the other "great" Democratic president of the 20th century, FDR, has receded from public memory). However, this "social memory" of JFK should not, following Halbwachs, be confused with history. JFK initiated a more significant involvement of U. S. troops in Vietnam during his brief presidency; Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) escalated this involvement and consequently doomed his own legacy. JFK is the light and LBJ the dark in Democrats' social memory of the 1960s. However, another "memory" is possible: under Johnson, a striking shift in a long-standing policy of over 300 years occurred in the signing of the Civil Rights Act (by LBJ). Fearing the desertion of Jim Crow southern Dixiecrats in the 1964 election, JFK equivocated on civil rights. Under LBJ and the pressure of the moral persuasion of Civil Rights activism (led by saint Martin), the historical mess of legally sanctioned institutional exclusion was cleared up in two years. In the terms of realpolitik, if there were "beneficiaries" of the Kennedy assassination, one set would be southern blacks.
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The association of JFK in particular with the mainstream liberal vision is not an act of nature. Depending on one's position in the political hierarchy, it could appear confusing that JFK, remembered more as geist than as mensch, is so closely identified with the political liberalism of the Democratic party. LBJ, whose sole, decidedly negative political value has come to be identified with Vietnam, was the sponsor of the Great Society, the most comprehensive liberal policy agenda in American history (Ok maybe the New Deal was more comprehensive). In particular, the domestic legacy of the Johnson years is the "second" welfare state, whose "needs-based" criterion and "new subjects" (the chronically un- and underemployed, single mothers, children, and students) share an uneasy coexistence with the "first" welfare state, whose "contribution-based" criterion and "old subjects" (ethnic, working-class men) continue to be more politically defensible (it is probably not a coincidence that Bill Clinton carried through his campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it" in 1996). JFK's New Frontier looks decidedly complacent in comparison to the Great Society. However, it is the symbolic reappropriation of JFK that is the foundation of liberal Democratic politics rather than Johnson and the Great Society, which is burdened with the spectacle of Vietnam and the anti-war movement, as well as political crimes of the neo-conservative imagination -- i.e., big government, welfare corruption, reverse discrimination, crime, the erosion of values, etc. Because LBJ's record is decidedly mixed ("right" militarily, "left" socially), the Texan is unfit to function as the spiritual source of the politics of the liberal Democratic mainstream. The fact that the exclusive access to the Kennedy aura remains a point of honor to a generation of liberals and Democrats whose political well-being is based on hoarding the memory of the fallen JFK could be seen in the exchange between Democratic Senator Lloyd Bentsen and Republican Senator Dan Quayle during the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate (Bentsen to Quayle: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy").
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Hillary Clinton's "error" was to invoke LBJ in seeming opposition to saint Martin. Her rhetoric tread upon the sacred, and the critical response was predictable. In the fine tradition of the debauched American public sphere, she has turned the tables on the critics and Obama by claiming the criticism has introduced "race" (obviously "divisive" and obviously inconsistent with the communitarian imagery of Obama's speeches) into the campaign. Which is exactly what Clinton wants.
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