Obama, Hillary, Civil Rights

I hope to stay away from too much of the electoral nattering, as I find most of it frustratingly narrow and gossipy. My main interest is in pushing political discussion beyond the narrow parameters of electoral promises and compromises. But it would be perverse to ignore electoral politics in an election year. So let me just say something about the idiotic media game around Hillary's comments and Obama's response to her comments on Martin Luther King Jr. Much like Hillary's much-hyped emotional moment just before the New Hampshire primaries, this another superficial non-issue that nonetheless might have some impact on the elections. Whether Hillary mischaracterized the civil rights movement, and LBJ's role in it, is somewhat besides the point. No doubt she did do so, and to further her own campaign image by trying to reflect the positive glow of civil rights off the dull metal of 'experience' and 'competence.'

But that Obama should gain by this is what rankles. Obama looks good only in the negative, as somewhat who didn't make quite such a crude attempt to connect his candidacy to remembrance of things past. Yet his coy game of denying any attempt to exploit Hillary's minor gaffe while aggressively commenting all the while on how he's not commenting, is just as opportunistic. Obama is trying to play to an image, of the authentic bearer of progress, including a real inheritor of the civil rights legacy, without any of the substance. There is absolutely no reason to believe Obama will make a serious attempt to deal with the most serious issues facing Blacks in America. Despite his community-organizing past, Obama has never done much beyond defend some kind of affirmative action. We have never seen him take any meaningful legislative initiative on the truly messed up criminal justice system, poverty, the decline of well-paying industrial jobs, crappy school systems, which is to say, any of the structural problems that face most African-Americans. In fact, whenever I raise this issue with pro-Obama friends, they have to point to his past as a community-organizer and a as a constitutional law professor, but can't identify anything meaningful in his legislative record - which is surely what should matter. In fact his voting record in the Senate is truly unremarkable. Obama is happy to catch the benefit of an impolitic remark by Hillary, but he's all image.

My point is that a superficial debate over a campaign comment, and symbolic positions between the two comments, gets all kinds of play, but their actual positions do not. It would behoove us not to fall prey to the narrow way in which the candidates, and the media bloodhounds, present the issue. When one gets down to the nitty-gritties, the fact of the matter is neither candidate will do much of anything when it comes to the problems of today that are analogous to the issues faced during the civil rights movement.