Hillary Clinton and RFK
by KevinMay 27th, 2008
Okay, old news, but Joan Walsh seems to think that any outrage over Clinton’s comments is manufactured:
Thanks to my long weekend, I could probably get away without addressing the controversy over Clinton’s RFK remarks, which is finally dying down. But I think this is an important and disturbing issue for Democrats. Criticize Clinton’s vote to authorize the Iraq war, her pandering on the gas tax holiday, her lame remarks about “hardworking Americans, white Americans,” her response to Obama’s “bitter” remarks, her lackluster campaign strategy coming into 2008. I’ve criticized all of that, and more. But to argue that she was suggesting she’s staying in the race because Obama might be assassinated — even after both Clinton, and the journalists who interviewed her, said her reference was to RFK’s June campaign, not to his heartbreaking murder — requires either a special kind of paranoia or venal political opportunism.
This is very wrong, and it is wrong in a way that highlights some of the blindness of certain Clinton supporters. The Clinton campaign has unabashedly been, at least in part, about the notion that Clinton is more electable than Obama. Her arguments about winning in swing states is one example, but much of the argument has been a more subtle version of “the black guy can’t win”. When Clinton talks about how Obama cannot connect with hardworking, white Americans, when her camp says that when Bill tries to discount Obama’s victory in South Carolina by saying African Americans always win South Carolina, when the campaign is slow to distance from Ferraro after her racist remarks, when Clinton refuses to clearly state that Obama is not a Muslim on 60 minutes the implication is pretty clear: Obama cannot win because he is Black. The argument isn’t really being made very subtly anymore, and it is that argument that needs to be kept in mind when viewing the reaction to her comments about RFK’s assassination.
From Edgar Mevers to Martin Luther King, Black political leaders have been removed by the simple expediency of a bullet. It is a known and frightening part of our history, and it is no secret that racism is a live and well in this country and in this campaign. So when Clinton, after months of sometimes clumsy and offensive variations of the argument “the black guy can’t win”, implies that she needs to stay in the race because a popular candidate was killed late in the primary process, it is a legitimate window into her thinking. Clinton has stubbornly and steadfastly clung to the fiction that Obama is simply unacceptable to white working class males and thus must lose the general election. No one seriously thinks that she believes that Obama is likely to be assassinated, but I think it is reasonable to note that the comment is just an extreme version of an argument that is simply and obviously not correct. That Clinton would, even in an unguarded moment, use the death of a popular leader as a reason she must continue her campaign against an African American candidate it is a disturbing look at just how deeply Clinton and, by extension, her campaign has internalized the notion that “the black guy can’t win”.
And that is a worrying sign. Because if they believe it that deeply, then it is much more likely that they will continue to run a campaign that makes, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, the argument that the Democrats cannot risk running a black man for the Presidency. There is nothing at all good that can come from that and that is absolutely something to be concerned about.
I disagree with you — I think the benign interpretation of her comments is the most reasonable one. Given the context you mention, though, it was an ugly and reckless thing to say, and her apology was meager and off-base.
(I make this argument at some length here. For more on black responses to Clinton’s comment, check out this post from Slant Truth.)
Brooklynite
I am not sure I entirely disagree. I don;t think the comment was meant to be mean-spirited or that it was anything other than a slip of the the tongue. I just think it was a revealing slip of the tongue, given the way the campaign has played out to date.
I guess I don’t necessarily see it as revealing, even as a slip of the tongue.
I’ll give you a similar example. When I’m talking about Martin Luther King and his relationship to economic class issues, I’ll often mention that when he was assassinated he was in Memphis supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. I don’t intend that as a suggestion that he was killed for labor organizing, just as a way of linking a fact that most people know about King — that he was assassinated in Memphis — to one that’s a lot more obscure.
That’s what I think Clinton was doing. For her, the fact that RFK was killed on on the night of the California primary is a piece of shared historical data. By noting that the assassination happened in June, she was leveraging that shared knowledge to make a point. I don’t read anything deeper into it than that, even on a psychological level.
I do think her failure to perceive that there were other cultural resonances to the RFK reference is significant, though, and as I suggested above, the fact that she didn’t find a way to address the problem forthrightly is troubling.
I don’t read too much into the remark, other than an incredible lack of sensitivity which, to me, is a reflection of an almost pathological ego-centric being.
On the other hand, I do believe it is highly deceiving to cite the two examples that HRC did as precedent for her situation. Even the fact that she fudged the date of the California primary - June 2 - to be “sometime in the middle of June”, although minor, is yet another example of being intentionally deceptive. It is the same old tired political game of say whatever is expedient, knowing that the majority of people will just hear the soundbite and not hear the actual facts.
when Clinton refuses to clearly state that Obama is not a Muslim on 60 minutes
This, I expect, refers to the time when she said Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know.” I’m going to defend her on this one point. This was the actual exchange, as reported by MMFA:
KROFT: You don’t believe that Senator Obama is a Muslim?
CLINTON: Of course not. I mean, that’s — you know, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn’t any reason to doubt that.
KROFT: And you said you’d take Senator Obama at his word that he’s not a Muslim.
CLINTON: Right. Right.
KROFT: You don’t believe that he’s a Muslim –
CLINTON: No. No. Why would I? There’s no –
KROFT: — or implying, right?
CLINTON: No, there is nothing to base that on, as far as I know.
KROFT: It’s just scurrilous –
CLINTON: Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors. I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time.
She was asked the same question repeatedly. Her answers were “of course not … no basis for that … isn’t any reason to doubt [his word] … No. No. Why would I? … nothing to base that on.”
Then and only then did she add the tag line “as far as I know” before referring to the “rumor” as a “smear.” Turning all that into a “refusal to clearly state” that Obama isn’t Muslim, as happened almost immediately, is at least as false and deceptive as the yammering and hammering over Obama’s use of the word “bitter.”
My own complaint in this case is that she at no point said “There’s no reason to think he’s other than what he says he is. But what if he is Muslim? Where in the Constitution does it say ‘freedom of religion - except for Muslims?’ Where in the Constitution does it say Muslims can’t run for president? Why are you pandering to that kind of religious bigotry?”
Not that I would actually expect one candidate to make that kind of aggressive response on behalf of a rival but I certainly would have been nice to see.
Good point LarryE. I thought I had seen/read everything related to the primary, but I had never seen the actual video of HRC’s quote. Having seen it, I find it completely reasonable and in no way underhanded.
2 things: The RFK reference was a historical timeline reference, nothing more. Anyone who was an adult at the time knows of RFK’s funeral train going across the country viewed by thousands. And thousands more seeing his casket during those hot June days in D.C. before his burial. It was a huge event for those who lived through it. Obambi supporters seem to forget that the personal risk for Hillary is just as great if not greater.
Second: Obambi is only black when it suits his personal gain. In his book he writes about stepping back and forth betwen white and black worlds and learning to keep each happy. Quite a con artist. Yes, he’ll probably lose 2-5% of white voters because he keeps calling himself black. But he’s such a shockingly unnaccomplished politician! Fortunately, as time goes on and his gaffes pile up he gets weaker, and Hillary gets stronger. He would be a disaster in the General Election.
Alan, I was only a teenager at the time, but my memory of the events is different from yours. RFK lay in state in NYC, not DC, and the funeral train then took his body from NYC to Arlington (not across the country) where he was buried.
“Why are you pandering to that kind of religious bigotry?”
No, we wouldn’t want anyone to think a liberal is guilty of religious bigotry. That just doesn’t happen.