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The Abyss of Identity Politics.

With the perhaps not-so-stunning revelation that Barack Obama’s friend, pastor, and mentor, Jeremiah Wright (the title of “The Audacity of Hope” comes directly from Wright) has, among other things, suggested that the United States is responsible for AIDS, blamed the U.S. for bringing 9/11 upon itself, and suggesting that African-Americans (emphasis on the “African,” evidently) sing “God Damn America”, Barack Obama is once again in the same boat as he found himself when his wife made her “misunderstood” remarks about only just now being able to be proud of America. That is to say, the man who was supposed to be above it all, the man who was supposed to be beyond race, the man who was supposed to represent “change” is being dragged down into the slime of identity politics.

By this, I don’t mean to suggest that Barack Obama is some sort of crypto-Black Panther or, even more cliche, some sort of “America-hatin’ librul” who wants to become President only to tear down this country. Such theories are ridiculous, to say the least. He’s not even the kind of race-baiting huckster exemplified by such personalities as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. No, what all of this reveals about Barack Obama is quite a bit more mundane — literally. Beginning with the Tony Rezko debacle, events of the last few months have revealed Senator Obama to be, well… pretty much just another politician, albeit one with a handsome face and an admittedly impressive command of oratory (and, agree with his politics or not, his speechcraft has been a breath of fresh air after a better part of a decade of George W. Bush’s verbal bumbling).

While the Clinton campaign has been, by all accounts, a terribly mis-managed affair that seemed to assume easy victory from the outset,  one would be remiss to forget that the Clintons are two of the most skilled politicians this country has seen in decades — and like all skilled politicians, they’re masters of skullduggery. What this means for someone like Barack Obama, a politician playing as something more messianic, is that no opprtunity will be missed to try to deflate him and dim the glow that he surrounds himself with. Charles Krauthammer has written about just this dynamic:

 With no substantive differences left, the Obama-Clinton campaign was reduced to personality and identity. Not advantageous ground for Hillary. In a personality contest with the charismatic young phenom, she loses in a landslide…

If you cannot successfully pretty yourself, dirty the other guy. Hence the relentless attacks designed to redefine Obama and take him down to the level of ordinary mortals, i.e. Hillary’s. Thus the contrived shock on the part of the Clinton campaign that an Obama economic adviser would tell the Canadians not to pay too much attention to Obama’s anti-NAFTA populism or that Samantha Power would tell the BBC not to pay too much attention to Obama’s current withdrawal plans for Iraq.

The attack line writes itself: Says one thing and means another. So much for the man of new politics. Just an ordinary politician — like Hillary.


So if there are no policy issues between them and the personality differences have been whittled down, what’s left? Identity. Race, age, and gender. Is this campaign about anything else?

And that’s the rub: the battle between Clinton and Obama has really come down to melanin and estrogen, and supporters on both sides are too caught up in their own dreams of “making history” to see how identity politics is beginning to bear its ugly fruit in the Democratic Party.

The Republicans, as clumsy and out-of-touch as that party has been since the end of Bill Clinton’s Presidency, rarely seem to fall into the trap of chopping their constituents into discrete interest groups — at least in the same way the Democrats tend to. The Christian right, of course, is the major exception to this, though even in that case, and Mike Huckabee aside, appeals to the Christian right tend to be couched in more general terms of “morals” and “family values”. Candidates who do explicitly play to the Christian base, like Huckabee, tend to do relatively poorly even against other Republicans. No, the Republicans seem altogether more issues-driven: immigration, national defense, taxes, gun rights — these are the things that Republicans run on (and I’d argue that gun ownership cuts across all social, ethnic, sexual, and economic divisions in this country, so while the gun lobby is a big one, it’s not qualitatively the same as, say, “the African-American vote”).

Conversely, since the Civil Rights era Democrats have increasingly courted identity votes: “the gay vote,” “the Hispanic vote,” “the African-American vote,” “women voters,” etc.  Per Krauthammer again:

The pillars of American liberalism — the Democratic party, the universities, and the mass media — are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender. They have insisted, moreover, that pedagogy and culture and politics be just as seized with the primacy of these distinctions and with the resulting “privileging” that allegedly haunts every aspect of our social relations.

They have gotten their wish. This primary campaign represents the full flowering of identity politics. It’s not a pretty picture. Geraldine Ferraro says Obama is only where he is because he’s black. Professor Orlando Patterson says the 3 A.M. phone call ad is not about a foreign policy crisis but a subliminal Klan-like appeal to the fear of “black men lurking in the bushes around white society.”

Good grief.

Good grief, indeed. The toxic effects of identity politics are now being seen in the bitter struggle between the Democratic candidates, with voters increasingly dividing themselves by gender and skin color. It’s taken for granted that African-Americans will vote for Obama, and that women will line up behind Hillary. Unfortunately, one suspects this has less to do with their respective politics and more to do with race and gender.

In 1963, Dr.  Martin Luther King famously said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The politics of identity are in the process of burying that dream.

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