Bill Clinton may not be the most graceful in utterance of our
public men, but no one has ever thought his political instincts to
be less than finely tuned. So when the other day he said: “I think
it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had
two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest
of this country” — meaning, as the context made clear, John McCain
and Mrs. Clinton and rather pointedly leaving out Barack Obama —
he was pointing his fellow Democrats at a real electoral problem
for them and not just engaging, as an Obama adviser suggested, in
“McCarthyism.”
In fact, the charge of McCarthyism is itself about as close as
we get these days to McCarthyism. Certainly, any kind word directed
towards the late senator from Wisconsin is in our current media
climate at least as discreditable to the speaker as praise of
Communism would have been in McCarthy’s day.
It is a media truism that questioning a candidate’s patriotism
— at least if he is a Democrat — is going beyond the bounds of
civilized discourse. But forbidding the direct imputation of a lack
of patriotism, or crying foul at the indirect one, does not mean
that voters will be unaware of some of the more unsettling
implications of Senator Obama’s refusal to disown — as opposed to
merely disagreeing with — the rantings of the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright on America’s endless culpability as “the number one killer
in the world.”
This has been a problem for the Democratic Party going back to
George McGovern. Michael Novak, who was writing speeches for the
McGovern campaign in 1972, tells the story of writing one for the
candidate that was to be delivered at a Catholic high school in
Chicago. “Be as critical of the war as you like,” Mr. Novak
advised, “but don’t call it ‘immoral.’ These are people whose
fathers, sons and brothers are fighting there, and they don’t think
they’re doing anything immoral in serving their country.” Being
from the Catholic working class himself, he said, he knew that when
such people hear the word “immoral,” they automatically assume that
it is being directed at them by the WASP establishment.
But to most of the electorate, it became more and more clear
that Senator McGovern was the captive of a kind of academic
anti-Americanism that was then much to be heard in the “debate”
over the Vietnam war and that was later to be characterized by
another renegade Democrat as the “blame America first” tendency.
The fact that McGovern subsequently won the lowest share of the
popular vote of any major-party candidate in the history of
American presidential elections — and this in spite of his
opposition to what was by then a highly unpopular war — can surely
not be unrelated.
Nor can it be completely irrelevant to Senator Obama’s wish to
hang on to his association with Rev. Wright. The ABC newsman and
former Bill Clinton aide, George Stephanopoulos, spoke of this
possibly suicidal loyalty as being “in many ways an act of honor,”
and he’s quite right. But the question that Americans will be
asking in November will be who, then, is the relevant honor group?
Who, that is, are those to whom the candidate’s loyalty is more
important to him even than getting elected? Is it just a few
hate-mongers like the Rev. Wright preaching “God damn America”? Or
is it some larger group, like those working-class Catholics who
heard the word “immoral” as an attack on them?
“I can no more disown him,” said Senator Obama about Rev.
Wright, “than I can disown the black community.” That was of course
his attempt to make it seem that the answer to the question was
that he was really being loyal not to the Reverend but to his roots
among a people who have historically been the victims of the white
majority wielding the levers of political power which they have
good reason to know has not always been morally applied. Never mind
that he is half-white. Never mind that his father was an African
who was not the descendant of slaves or that he had a
relatively privileged upbringing. He wishes to claim “the black
community” as his own people, as he has every right to do.
But he is also reminding us that that community still defines
itself by its victimization. The Catholics whom Michael Novak knew
would also close ranks against the criticisms of outsiders had
nevertheless found a way to identify their own honor with that of
their country. This is what “the black community” as such (though
not, of course, individual blacks) has never been able to do. It
was adopted en bloc in the 1960s by the academic and
McGovernite left as evidence of America’s institutional oppression
of minorities, and ever since the most outspoken and radical black
leaders — even, at times, Rev. Martin Luther King — have tended
to treat the honor of their country and that of their own community
as antithetical.
The wild theories of the Rev. Wright about AIDS or drugs as part
of a government-sponsored plot against “people of color” and
such-like nonsense are really just rhetorical ploys, meant to keep
resentments at the boil as a way of enforcing political solidarity
in the black community. In other words, by insisting on identifying
himself so closely with that community, Senator Obama is
proclaiming himself programmatically anti-American. He is
also identifying himself with the McGovernite left whose more
extreme elements do not shy away from claiming, as Rev. Wright
does, that even the 9/11 terror-attacks on America were America’s
own fault.
This is what Bill Clinton, whose own election owed something to
a deliberate repudiation of Jesse Jackson (through his surrogate,
Sister Souljah) was so maladroitly hinting at the other day, just
as he was on the last occasion when he caused controversy in this
campaign by comparing Senator Obama to the Rev. Jackson. Senator
Obama himself has now, in effect, let it be known that the former
president was right in both cases.
