Raising Race

Purpose Statement

In this paper I examine the "experience" argument used by Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, revealing its racial undertones. I am not suggesting that Mrs. Clinton is a racist or even that she prefers to run on "experience." My purpose is descriptive. I leave the question of intent to classmates and colleagues.

-- By AdamCarlis - 14 Feb 2008

Introduction

Hillary Clinton targets potential voters by highlighting her experience. Unlike her equally ubiquitous "change" slogan ("Working for Change; Working for You"), Hillary's "experience" argument fails the sniff test. When Mrs. Clinton says "experience" she is actually speaking in code; making an argument that preys upon the electorate’s hidden racial prejudices.

Hillary's Experience

As many writers have shown, (and here), Hillary's experience buckles under scrutiny. Her "35 years of change" include fifteen working as a corporate attorney, defending companies like WalMart and Tyson's Chicken. Moral judgments aside, no reasonable person would classify her legal career as change-oriented executive experience.

• This argument assumes that the only relevant experience is executive experience. If the assumption is questionable when directed against Obama, it is equally questionable when directed against Clinton. The President is not the Quartermaster General or the COO of General Electric. Most of the CEOs of publicly-traded companies I deal with spend far more time in advocacy--trying to persuade securities analysts to like their management and key customers to like their products and services--than they spend administering complex operations. The President is many things, which makes the job very difficult. Being the actual chief executive of the US Government, however, is rarely one of them. Determining what makes good experience for being President is non-trivial, but executive experience and capacity--which distinguished Hoover and Eisenhower above all other occupants of the office--might well not be the best place to start.

Her public service career is equally suspect. Twenty years as first lady gave her insight into the daily life of an executive. However, claiming such familiarity will make her a skilled executive is tantamount to claiming that a sports reporter improves her swing after covering the Red Sox or a historian studying the Kennedy White House would be skilled at negotiating an end to a nuclear missile crisis. Observing and doing are two very different things and, during her years as first lady, Hillary did not do much. In fact, her most important attempt at acting like an executive failed, resulting in our current health care crisis.

• Two fallacies are joined here. If "being President" were a muscular skill like hitting major-league pitching, we wouldn't need a 10,493-game season before the World Series. Knowing how other Presidents have "been President" is the best training for the job we know about, which is why incumbents tend to spend much of their free time reading histories of other Presidencies and biographies of other Presidents. A. Lincoln--an exceptional intellect, no doubt--learned much military strategy in the first year of the rebellion from reading the military science collection of the Library of Congress, not in order to fight the war himself, but to meet what seemed to him the responsibility of the civilian commander in chief to choose and allocate his generals. Which brings us to your second fallacy, which is judging a general in the field by the result of the battle. If her task was to listen to all parties and produce good legislation, she didn't fail at all--those who judge her by the failure are not criticising the quality of her legislation. The very argument you advance above, that she was the President's Wife and not the President, means that the blame for the failure which did occur, the failure to pass the legislation that came from the Task Force, should be laid to her husband, whose job it was to get the plan through Congress.

Since leaving her husband's shadow, Hillary's time in the Senate has been similarly unremarkable. She has no major legislative accomplishments to speak of and her vote on the key issue of the past 8 years, authorizing the use of force against Iraq, has proven unpopular. Since being present cannot count as experience, absent leadership on any major bill, it is hard to see how Hillary's time in the Senate has prepared her for the presidency. Therefore, when Hillary speaks of experience, she is not inviting an analysis of her record. What, then, does Mrs. Clinton mean by experience? While it may just be empty rhetoric, it is, at least, rhetoric that has won her votes. Therefore, there is likely something more than style behind her words.

• This is a poor argument. There are many kinds of Senators in the complex little structure that is the 100-person Senate. There are foreign relations Senators, such as Mike Mansfield and John Kerry. There are the military-budget specialists, like John Warner and Carl Levin. There are "workhorse" legislators who are adept at really getting legislation through the body, like Edward Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, or like Lyndon Johnson, who was the best of them all. There are partisan cheerleaders, like Trent Lott and Dick Durbin. And there are specialists in working the system from the 30,000-foot down to top-of-trees level to get money and freedom-to-operate for the large municipalities, non-profits, and businesses that are the key engines in their home states. Some of these are appropriators like Ted Stevens, but the best are multi-specialized policy generalists with a good grasp of how policy details affect the whole socio-economic ecology of the sub-societies they represent, like Ted Domenici and Pat Moynihan. Big states like New York, California and Texas need these Senators intensely. New York is fortunate to have two at the moment. Texas has one in Kay Bailey Hutcheson. California has one and a half, because Senator Boxer--though an imbecile--has an exceedingly competent staff. You could debate of course whether having an exhaustive grip on policy in twenty different areas is a good acquisition for the US President. But to deny that Senator Clinton's career in that body proves she has one is to ignore the obvious.

The Age Issue

Mrs. Clinton is nearly 20 years older than Mr. Obama. The candidates' generation gap is mirrored by their supporters. By asserting her experience, Mrs. Clinton says to older voters that she is one of them and Mr. Obama is a precocious child not quite ready for a seat at the adults table.

This is a dangerous tactic; one that backfired when used against John F. Kennedy Jr. and Bill Clinton (who, like Obama, was 47 during his first presidential campaign). Given the Democratic Party's pride in JFK and Mr. Clinton, let alone Mrs. Clinton's reliance on her husband's success, it would be both foolish and disingenuous of her to raise the age issue directly. Doing so in a coded fashion; however, offers all the benefits without any of the risk: she can highlight Mr. Obama's youth without forcing comparisons to two of history's most popular Democrats.

• The Clinton campaign hasn't said Obama's too young--they've said he hasn't done enough yet to be President, which may or may not be true but is different. Your thesis requires you to show in the end that this argument (that he has trained himself to write and speak well, served a brief while in a state legislature without much effect, and has been running for President since the moment he arrived in Washington) is subtly racist. It's a poor argument (minus two years in the House of Representatives followed by a decisive electoral loss for opposing a popular war, Obama's is more-or-less the pre-Presidential resume of A. Lincoln himself), so you shouldn't need to stuff straw men in order to deal with it. But because you've claimed it's a racist argument, you need to find "boy" somewhere, and you are skirting the edge of inventing your evidence.

The Race Issue

If the age argument couldn't defeat the great Democrats of the past, why use it now? Perhaps Mr. Obama's race gives the issue its teeth. Historically, white supremacy has used "son" and "boy" to emasculate and infantilize black men in an attempt to neutralize their growing power. While Mrs. Clinton can't directly campaign by positioning Mr. Obama as a child (Mr. Clinton has referred to him as "kid"), she can conjure that image in the minds of those who hear her "experience" argument. It is a subliminal cue to voters and one most of us don't recognize until it invades our subconscious. By uniting the issue of age with our history of racial subjugation, it becomes more powerful than the same force wielded against a white candidate.

• This, in my view, is entirely unconvincing. There are many audiences a white Democratic politician with strong support in the black community can be addressing by sending a message that the other candidate is young and has been a drug user, including older, church-going socially engaged African-Americans. The Clintons have forgotten more about campaigning in the black community than you and I are likely ever to know, and they know now even better than when Bill used Sister Souljah as a fulcrum for leveraging his image in 1992, trusting that he could send his messages by criticizing a prominent African-American without alienating the community as a whole. And White Supremacy is never going to vote for Hillary Clinton, so she's no purpose whatever in appealing to anyone who positively receives messages addressed there. You needed to show, in order to make out your claim, not that this and the following passage contain messages that were sent, but that your reading is each case the intended reading, and not a possible reading adopted for the purpose of supporting an ad hominem of your own. That burden isn't being carried.

This is only one of Mrs. Clinton's many injections of race into the campaign. As a top campaign advisor spoke about Obama's past drug use, other surrogates referred to him as "the black candidate" in what looked like a coordinated effort to caricature Mr. Obama as the stereotypical urban, black, drug abuser. After a victory in South Carolina, Mr. Clinton publicly compared Obama's campaign to that of Jesse Jackson, an analogy that misses on every issue except race. And, during the recent debate, Hillary, after announcing that immigrants were taking jobs from American workers, confirmed her pollster's false claim that Latino voters have "not shown a lot of willingness . . . to support black candidates." These subtle hints are coming together to form the background music of the Clinton campaign, facilitating voters' subconscious leap from "experience" to "white."

Conclusion

Despite losing almost every demographic in the recent Virginia primary, Mrs. Clinton carried 93% of the voters who claimed that candidate experience was the key factor in their decision. Given that Virginia has an open primary and John McCain (who was a POW while Mrs. Clinton was still an undergrad and has three times her congressional experience) was also running, those voters must mean something besides "experience" when they say "experience." Gone are the days when segregationist Democrats loudly declare their racist ambitions from the steps of the statehouse. Yet today similar emotions are being stirred up, albeit in a more secretive and perhaps more palatable way by a candidate who, by all other accounts, detests racism.

• This Conclusion presents a new argument, which makes one feel rushed, as though a tackle were occurring after the down. And the argument itself is so showily bogus that it makes the reader very doubtful. Now we have premise: A voter seeking experience will nearly always choose McCain over Clinton. Premise: Nearly all such voters chose Clinton. Entailment: Therefore they must prefer Clinton for some other reason. Conclusion: Aha, "experience" means "whiteness." But this would require showing that Clinton is whiter than McCain, which is difficult, because McCain comes from the party that has been supporting preferential whiteness for the last two generations, is himself rather white and in fact has, to be rather generous in the estimate, fully one tenth the amount of support in the black community that Clinton has. Leaving aside for the moment how his many years in the Senate--each of them demonstrating in their fullness his bad-tempered, go-it-alone, never-mince-words, cut everybody else's pork while reaching for your own disposition--prove he has everything but the qualities one usually supposes to be optimal for an "executive" rather than a despot--which might not be too reassuring to the experience crowd--you forgot to mention the word "war." There is one, after all, which he is perpetually for and she is currently against, and which the "let's have someone experienced this time around" crowd abhors pretty completely. This probably explains why they overwhelmingly don't want to vote for the guy who says we should spend another 100 years in Iraq.

• Nothing I have mentioned so far was anything other than obvious. Your own editing should have picked up these objections and dealt with them, as no doubt you could do. I don't think your position is untenable, although I do think that the emphasis on racialist messaging to the exclusion of all other possible criticisms of the Clinton position is an unnecessary shackle you impose on yourself, but I do think you should reconsider any argument for which so little logical support can be summoned.

# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, AdamCarlis