As I stated last night on the program, Hillary’s plantation comment last week on MLK Day at an all black church was as transparent as it gets. It seems as though Shelby Steele concurs with that assessment that Hillary’s “plantation” comment was “old-fashioned political and racial pandering.” Bubba could get away with it, but Hillary looked rediculous.
While some, like Barak Obama obfuscated Hillary’s statement by attempting to explain what “she really meant,” to Shelby Steele it was obvious:
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary’s remark as follows: “I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes–the wretched of the earth, a slave people–who will surely know all about plantations.” Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? Does she really see us as she projects us–as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
And to those who will invariably claim that her remarks were no different than Newt’s use of the word “plantation:”
If Newt Gingrich also once used the plantation metaphor in reference to Congress, his goal was only an innocuous one: to be descriptive, not to pander. He was speaking to a reporter, not to a black audience, and he had the good taste to cast himself as a slave who would “lead the slave rebellion.” Thus, he identified with the black struggle for freedom, not with the helplessness and humiliation of the plantation slave. If the plantation metaphor will always be inaccurate and hyperbolic where Congress is concerned, at least Mr. Gingrich’s use of it carried no offense.
At it’s very core Mr. Steele notes that the plantation comment originates from a more profound Democratic tradition of turning black resentment and a sense of grievance into liberal power :
And even Mrs. Clinton’s “offense” would have amounted to very little had it come from nothing more than an awkward metaphor. But, in fact, it came from a corruption in post-’60s liberalism and Democratic politics that profoundly insults blacks. Mrs. Clinton came to Al Sharpton’s MLK celebration looking for an easy harvest of black votes. And she knew the drill–white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton’s real insult to blacks–one far uglier than her plantation metaphor–is to value them only for their sense of grievance.
Dick Morris is a firm believer that Condi is the GOP’s best bet to beat Hillary in ’08. After Hillary’s comments, I believe that Mr. Morris may know what he is talking about.
No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is “overcoming” rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done.” And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.
This is why so many Republicans (including Laura Bush) now salivate at the thought of a Rice presidential bid. No other potential Republican candidate could–to borrow an old Marxist phrase–better “heighten the contradictions” of modern liberalism and Democratic power than Ms. Rice. The more ugly her persecution by the civil rights establishment and the left, the more she would give liberalism the look of communism in its last days–an ideology long since hollowed of its idealism and left with nothing save its meanness and repressiveness. Who can say what Ms. Rice will do. But history is calling her, or someone like her. She is the object of a deep longing in America for race to be finally handled, not by political idealisms, but by the classic principles of freedom and fairness.
Hillary, the titular head of the Democratic party and likely 08′ presidential nominee, has demonstrated how utterly insignificant and unserious the Democratic Party has become. They are a party without any forward looking positive agenda for America. They have been profoundly wrong on the most important issues of our time (i.e. the economy, Iraq and the larger War on Terror, and, as we witnessed last week, judicial nominations). Hillary’s comments demonstrate how desperate the party has become and how little they understand the very people who they claim to best represent.
Shelby Steele hits the proverbial “nail on the head.” Must read.