A good friend of mine from home happened to be in DC for a day last week. He and his girlfriend were on spring break from law school, and true to their political selves, they came to DC for a day among their other East Coast destinations to sit in on Supreme Court arguments. We went out for dinner after I got off work, and as we sat around eating at my favorite
Ethiopian restaurant, our talk naturally turned to the primaries.
Before I continue, a note of disclosure. I am an Obama supporter and have been for several months, but I'd not be heartbroken if Clinton ends up with the nomination. I just prefer Obama. I hope this doesn't become a candidate slam-fest, because I don't intend it to be so. I'd rather talk about growing up in Clinton territory.
I grew up in Arkansas in a family that lived and breathed politics. Our Representative in Congress, now our senior senator, lived just down the county road from my childhood home. My grandfather was a delegate to the state Democratic convention all throughout the 1970s. And my mother, through our complicated network of extended family, is Bill Clinton's distant cousin. I grew up hearing her stories about the Clintons in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This isn't that unusual: it seems to me that anyone whose family has been in Arkansas for more than a few generations has Bill Clinton story somehow or another. There are numerous stories of him growing up in Hot Springs, where I graduated from high school and first got to work on a major Democratic campaign in 2002. There's also a Southern Baptist lady I know, who has voted for a Republican in every single election of her life but for Clinton, who once as attorney general got her a refund on a defective Singer sewing machine. I once read an account of the 1992 campaign, where a campaign outsider observed that the Clinton supporters from Arkansas referred to him as Bill, while everyone else called him Mr. Clinton or Mr. Governor. I laughed when I read that, because so many of my friends and family from Arkansas used his first name too when talking about him. He was ours, and while he may have had some unusual taste in women, judging by his affairs, well, he was still a good governor, and we were proud of him.
When Bill ran for president the first time, I was in second grade. My mother took me to one of his campaign rallies in downtown Memphis, just a few miles from the town in Arkansas where I grew up, because she said that I might not ever get to see something like this again. Here was a man who had overcome a difficult childhood and written his own ticket to education and success, now running for president on his own merits and not what his family had given him. In 1996, she and I went to Little Rock for the election night party. I'm not sure I will ever forget the speech he gave from the steps of the Old State House as he accepted Bob Dole's concession. I still have the official poster from that night's celebration, framed in all of its hideous green and purple glory.
Personally, I have always held Bill (and Hillary, to a lesser extent) to be my role model. My family wasn't broken before my birth like his, and perhaps I was a little better off economically than he was. However, no one in my family has had a college education, and we've been farmers and factory workers for as many generations as anyone cares to remember. His rise from poverty to education and then such phenomenal success has been a powerful symbol for me, and I would be lying if I said that I didn't think about what he must have experienced at Georgetown every time someone at my own snobby university asked me why I was smart if my parents weren't college educated, or every time someone told me that I was only admitted to make our diversity numbers look better. In no way do I think I'll ever be president, but if he could rise to that office in such a short time, then I can certainly handle the flack I get from those who think that being an Arkansan is a handicap. Moreover, here was a white, Southern politician who managed to work across races. It was truly inspiring, especially when I saw the day-to-day racism that exists in so many ways in Eastern Arkansas.
It's with this in mind that I return to my conversation with my friend from Arkansas. He told me that of all the wonderful things that have come out of this primary season - massive voter turnout, increased party participation, and giving nearly every state a meaningful primary vote - the one thing that saddened him was how much respect he had lost for Bill. I hadn't clearly articulated my thoughts up to that point, but his comment brought it home to me. The race-baiting, the whisper campaigns, and his horrific comments leading up to the South Carolina primary breaks my heart and throws more dirt on the image of my role model than anything else he's done.
I remember when the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis gave Bill its International Freedom Award in 2003. Downtown Memphis was overflowing with people coming to the ceremony; journalists were consigned to a separate room to watch via simulcast because there were so many dignitaries who wanted good seats. An African-American columnist from the Memphis paper wrote that to her embarrassment, Bill stood and sang all of the verses to the Black National Anthem, of which she only knew the first. To say that Bill was loved by the African-Americans in my hometown of West Memphis would be an understatement. The whites in the town were divided between the parties, and the Republicans among them were largely horrified by his peccadilloes; on the other hand, I never met an African-American there who didn't support him. Toni Morrison called him "our first black president" in 1998, saying that he was "[b]lacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime." This sentiment rang true in my town, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure it still would. Not only do we now have an African-American candidate who actually could be elected in Toni Morrison's own lifetime, I wonder how this most loyal of communities, the African-Americans of West Memphis, sees Bill now.
I still hold on to Bill's success and achievement as an inspiration. On the days when even some of my fellow diplomats make snide comments about the Arkansan who has no Southern accent (as if it's surprising that I'm articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking), I grin and bear it, knowing that others have gone through worse and that I have to disprove the stereotype of the Arkansas redneck. But I have a sour taste in my mouth when I see my former hero, and I wonder what happened to the man who knew all of those verses.