One thing I got curious about over the course of this campaign was why Hillary Clinton commanded such loyalty from African-Americans. I’m a Hillary supporter, so I didn’t see African-American support for Hillary as something that stood in need of justification, but I was genuinely curious. It seemed to me that Sanders had a good platform in terms of speaking for our society’s downtrodden, so I wanted to understand the confidence of the Clinton camp, borne out by the polls, that African-Americans would be in their corner. i wasn’t particularly attentive to politics in the nineties, but I knew there were things enacted by Bill Clinton that are now understood to have significant negative consequences for African-Americans, and there were people at that time who called that correctly. So I wondered.
I went to the oracle of Palo Alto, and found this article, from Jamelle Bouie of Slate, which was very helpful:
From the beginning of his campaign, Bill Clinton did the opposite. Neither he nor his wife took blacks for granted, assiduously campaigning for the black vote in every possible venue. He emphasized his childhood in the segregated South and pledged to appoint blacks to high-ranking positions. In an approach that Barack Obama would mimic 16 years later, Clinton focused his efforts on black civic and community organizations, from church networks to civil rights groups. It paid off. Black voters carried Clinton through the Southern primaries and gave him the margins he needed to win the nomination.
To a large degree, Clinton’s black outreach—premised on his background and his cultural familiarity—was symbolic. Put frankly, Clinton felt comfortable around black people and never tried to hide it. On the other hand, however, he never promised to directly address black interests and he—after winning the nomination—tried to distance himself from black activists (e.g. the “Sistah Souljah moment”). But symbolic politics is potent, and black voters stuck with Clinton through the general election.
This established a pattern, of sorts. Clinton would always rely on black voters as a base, cultivating their support and appealing to them throughout his presidency. When it suited the circumstances, however, he would distance himself. He wasn’t a fair-weather friend, but he wasn’t a reliable ally either. But what was true was the extent to which he treated black Americans as equal partners in national life. He addressed black concerns in national addresses like the State of the Union and worked with black leaders on priorities like the Crime Bill. Both Clintons made active efforts to appeal to and respect black voters, which was not the norm for American politics (although, with George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservativism,” it became the norm, at least for a moment).
This seemed reasonable enough, but I think I understood it in my head more than in my gut.
Then, last night, I saw this ad:
It’s been out for a month now, I guess, but it showed up in a fundraising email two days ago, and I watched it. It is very artful in its use of music. It starts with music that sounds like a prologue that builds, and at the height of the build, there is a cymbal crash, and two men kiss. The section following the kiss is about what her Presidency would mean to girls, and since I have two nieces, that got to me. But that kiss...wow. In the video in which she announced her run for President, there was a line about a gay man getting married, but it almost seemed “tucked in” to the larger narrative. I was happy to see it, but this newer ad places a gay couple expressing affection physically at the narrative peak of the ad. And I was overwhelmed. I have watched the ad many times, but even typing this, I get tears in my eyes. Did I mention that I am gay? This ad made it clear to me how much gay people still feel like Tolerated Also-Rans in American public life, and how we are on the cusp of that changing. Cynics will say that Hillary is pandering to us, but even if that is true, it feels good to even be recognized as people worth pandering to, rather than being terminally marginal or downright invisible.
And suddenly, I understood, viscerally, what Jamel Bouie was saying about the comfort many African-Americans have with Hillary. Politics is about both policy and relationships.
Which helps to explain something about the widespread support Hillary enjoys in the Democratic party, which Jon Favreau wrote about recently:
Most of all—and you hear this all the time from people who’ve worked for her—Hillary Clinton is uncommonly warm and thoughtful. She surprises with birthday cakes. She calls when a grandparent passes away. She once rearranged her entire campaign schedule so a staffer could attend her daughter’s preschool graduation. Her husband charms by talking to you; Hillary does it by listening to you—not in a head-nodding, politician way; in a real person way.
... Your eyes are rolling. You don’t often see or read about this side of Hillary. You don’t doubt her fierce brilliance when she’s debating policy with Bernie Sanders. You don’t doubt her stamina or tenacity when she’s sitting through hour eleven of the Benghazi Kangaroo Court. But when it comes to nearly everything else, Clinton can seem a little too cautious and forced—like she’s trying too hard or not at all, preferring to retreat behind the safety of boilerplate rhetoric and cheesy soundbites.
There is a shadow side to this “relationships” business: I have no doubt that there is soft-glove cronyism, but I think that is probably inevitable in politics. The importance of relationships in politics, and Hillary’s apparent skill in cultivating and nurturing those, reinforces my resolution to support her, which has wavered at times. Bernie is a great guy, and has waged a strong, powerful campaign that will reverberate powerfully into the future for our party. I will feel some sadness about him falling short, if that is, in fact, what happens, which seems as likely as ever, if not moreso. But I feel that Hillary’s demonstrated understanding of the power of relationships in politics, domestically and on the world stage, will put her in a great position to build on the Obama legacy.