Race issue ensnares Democrats

The Democratic presidential race took a nasty turn last week, when Barack Obama’s campaign and prominent black Democrats accused Hillary and Bill Clinton of using racial innuendo in winning the New Hampshire primary. The Obama camp bristled over Hillary Clinton’s statement that Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream became a reality only when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Obama called that statement “ill-advised.” His supporters said Clinton had demeaned both King and the civil-rights movement, and also expressed anger that Bill Clinton had used the phrase “fairy tale” when describing Obama’s record. The former president later said he’d been referring only to Obama’s claims that he had opposed the war in Iraq, but some black Democrats said it sounded as if Clinton were mocking the idea that a black man could be elected president.

With race and gender resentments threatening to divide the party, both camps this week scurried to call a truce. Clinton said King’s sacrifice made it possible for both her and Obama to be “where we are today,” and Obama allowed that the Clintons have “always been on the right side” of civil-rights issues. The conciliatory tone was on display at a Democratic debate in Nevada, which holds its primary later this week. “Neither race nor gender should be part of this campaign,” Clinton said.

Too late, said David Brooks in The New York Times. Both Clinton and Obama have already “eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics.” Clinton is fighting “for little girls everywhere,” while an Obama victory is about “completing the dream.” But there’s a problem, because blacks and feminists are used to waging their identity-based campaigns against “the reactionary white male establishment,” not each other. “What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: The bonfire of the multicultural vanities.”

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Given the passions this historic confrontation is stirring up, the truce will probably not last, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News. Clinton, in fact, may continue to try to goad Obama into responding to the “rancid” bait of racial innuendo, which would badly damage his appeal as a new kind of Democrat who can transcend race and partisanship. “If he’s not careful, he could lose the whole rationale of his campaign.”