Race between Clinton and Obama is about identity, not policy
Elections can be about policy, personality or identity. The race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is surely not about policy. The differences between the two are microscopic.
It didn't start that way. When Hillary was headed toward a coronation, she deliberately ran to the center. She took more moderate views on Iraq, for example, and voted to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group.
When she began taking heat for these positions from the Democratic Party's activist core, she quickly tacked left to inhabit the same ideological space as Obama and the 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.
What to do? First, adjust your persona. Hence the New Hampshire tear and an occasional show of vulnerability to soften her image. But personality remakes are simply too difficult to pull off for someone as ingrained in the national consciousness as Clinton.
If you can't pretty yourself, dirty the other guy. Hence the attacks designed to redefine Obama down to the level of an ordinary mortal. Thus the contrived shock 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 Iraq withdrawal plans.
The attack line writes itself: He says one thing and means another. Just an ordinary politician -- like Hillary.
That same maladroit foreign policy adviser is caught calling Hillary a monster. A resignation demand nicely calls attention to the fact that the Obama campaign -- surprise! -- hurls invective. And a strategic mention of Tony Rezko, the Chicago fixer who was once Obama's patron, nicely attaches to Obama a whiff of corruption by association.
These attacks have a cumulative effect. Obama mania is beginning to wear off. Charisma is intrinsically transient. But Hillary has succeeded in hastening its dissipation.
So if there are no policy or personality differences, what's left? Identity. Race, age and gender. Is this campaign about anything else?
Nationally, the older white woman -- Clinton -- carries the senior vote, the white vote and the women's vote. The younger black man -- Obama -- carries the youth vote, the black vote and the male vote.
Did Bill Clinton deliberately encourage racial polarization by saying before South Carolina that one expects women to vote for Hillary and blacks for Obama? Or, after the primary, by dismissing Obama's victory with: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice"?
Two weeks before the South Carolina primary, Obama was leading Hillary among blacks by only 53 percent to 30 percent. On Election Day, he got 78 percent of the black vote. By Mississippi on Tuesday, Obama was getting 92 percent of the black vote and 26 percent of whites.
The Democratic Party, universities and mass media are obsessed with race and gender. They insist that pedagogy, culture and politics be seized with the primacy of such 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 a Klan-like appeal to the fear of "black men lurking in the bushes around white society."
Good grief. The optimist will say that when this is over, we will look back on the Clinton-Obama contest as the low point of identity politics, and the beginning of a turning away. The pessimist will just vote Republican.
© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group