Same Script, Different Day

For those of us who study the interaction of race, politics and the media, the events of the last few weeks in the Clinton-Obama electoral slugfest were painfully familiar: A white candidate or that candidate’s surrogates say or do something that African Americans will find racially insensitive, but that is likely to go over the heads of other Americans and, especially, white voters. When the black candidate’s supporters react, complaining of racial insensitivity, the white candidate’s camp displays feigned bewilderment and invokes the “racial sensitivity as racism” script:

• Why are you people so obsessed with race?
• We didn’t mention race, so you’re just being overly sensitive, divisive, and “playing the race card.”
• The American public wants to get beyond race, why can’t you?

The black candidate is left sputtering, trying to explain why, really, it was the other side that played the race card. By that time, the white candidate has moved on to address other issues, because the news media now have the opening they need to keep the race question alive indefinitely, without any new bait from either side.

This script is designed to make voters choose racial sides. Should they abandon the white candidate for making remarks that, though neutral on their face, have offended many African Americans? Or should they shy away from the black candidate and his or her supporters for an unsavory and confusing focus on the divisive issue of race? More troubling, the script inevitably makes the black candidate just that—a black candidate—in the media public mind, while the white candidate remains just a candidate, one for “all the people.”

Because most non-African Americans don’t understand the racial subtext of the original comments—or, at least, don’t feel their sting as acutely—and because most believe that racial bias is generally a thing of the past, those voters tend to gravitate toward the white candidate as the race-neutral, less divisive one.

The script played out in the 1980s with Jesse Helms’ “hands” ad against Harvey Gantt in North Carolina, and in 2006 in the “call me” ad against Harold Ford in Tennessee. Even George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis was a form of this ploy, though in this case it was directed toward a white candidate.

Each of these ads was ostensibly about race-neutral facts and opinion. But each had its intended effect of racializing and, thereby, neutralizing the black (or, in Dukakis’s case, liberal) candidate.

In the latest case, the script was triggered by a flurry of actions by the Clinton camp, including Hillary Clinton diminishing the importance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s achievements; Mrs. Clinton’s surrogates, according to The New York Times, “pushing hard the line that a woman president would be ‘the real’ change”; and Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s landslide victory in South Carolina to, of all things, Jesse Jackson’s Pyrrhic victories in that state’s primary in 1984 and 1988.

When Obama supporters—and many who do not support Obama—objected to the tone and implication of these kinds of statements, they were met with act two of the script: Bill Clinton told a crowd in Charleston, S.C., "It is wrong to accuse somebody who has a disagreement with Senator Obama of being a racist." He told reporters that Mrs. Clinton “did not play the race card, but (Obama's campaign) did. They are feeding you this, because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for ... Shame on you. Shame on you." And he reprimanded CNN reporter Jessica Yellin, saying: "This is almost like once you accuse someone of racism and bigotry, the facts become irrelevant. The first thing I'd like to say: You asked me about this. Not one single solitary citizen asked about any of this, and they never do." The former president nailed every major line of the script.

Bill Clinton is at least half right. The press can’t get enough of the race script, and that is likely to follow Obama into the February 5 “Super Tuesday” primaries—despite the sizable numbers of non-black voters he’s attracted in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and, now, South Carolina.

Now, it is certainly possible that Hillary Clinton did not fully understand what she was unleashing with her comments about Dr. King, or where her husband and staff would go with it. But the script is now in full swing, and it will now take affirmative intervention to interrupt it.

Given Obama’s victory in South Carolina, it might appear to some that the script failed in this instance. But, in fact, it served its intended purpose. As Patrick Buchanan (a master of the script) explained on CNN the night of the South Carolina primary, making both the Obama campaign and the South Carolina primary about race allows pundits and voters to frame that victory as a triumph of racial politics, as opposed to Super Tuesday, when millions of “real” Americans will cast their vote. Losing South Carolina, and many black voters around the country, was worth doing, in his estimate, in return for Super Tuesday. Indeed, following the script, CNN commentators as this column went to press were describing South Carolina a “race primary.” No one else in either campaign has to utter another word about race for the race script to continue playing, with its intended effect.

The big question, though, is whether Obama’s victory speech in South Carolina will have the effect of shaming not just the Clinton campaign, but also the lion’s share of media pundits and political reporters out of perpetuating the racial script.

Obama’s speech both outed the script and attempted to transcend it. He tried to convince voters that supporting him irrespective of his race, rather than fearing him as a “race candidate,” is actually the American thing to do. Like JFK’s speech allaying fears about his Catholicism, Obama did not deny or degrade his race; but he denied being defined by it.

Of course race, unlike religion, is neither a belief system nor a characteristic that one can change. What Obama was really renouncing, then, was the script’s depiction of black politicians as race men, concerned only—or at least primarily—with helping members of their own group overcome race-based barriers. Only time will tell whether Obama’s response is enough to flip the script.