Eric Alterman writes a column in today’s Guardian of London: Whither John Edwards? Things haven't been going his way lately. But running against a black man and a polarizing woman, he's still the most electable Democrat.
Seven paragraphs into his piece he writes:
“Edwards is running left in a country in which much of the left - much too much for my taste - defines its politics in terms of identity. On both scores, he loses to the two frontrunners.”
But virtually every other ‘graph is dedicated to an obsession with the very “identity politics” Alterman feigns to dislike.
To Alterman, Clinton must be viewed mainly in the context of her gender and Obama must be defined mainly by the color of his skin...
This is what Alterman says about Clinton:
“Clinton's campaign is running according to plan. She's the Establishment candidate with the added bonus of being the first woman presidential nominee - a perfect plus in a Democratic nominee.”
And here, about Obama:
“The Black Thing, it must be added, is also a perfect positive in a Democratic primary, since whatever racists do vote in these contests are more than outnumbered black people themselves. And what liberal Democrat does not tingle a bit at idea of electing an eloquent and inspiring black man to replace these evil &%@!$%! currently ruining our good name all around the world?”
And then Alterman – who has never managed a successful campaign and has no visible track record predicting an election’s results ahead of time (a standard that all vocal claimers of any candidate’s “electability” ought to be held to) – goes on to borrow the racist and sexist argument of conservative columnist Robert Novak to make his case that Edwards is “the most electable Democrat.” Alterman writes:
“Edwards is the most electable Democrat for the same reason that Bob Novak named on Meet the Press.”
Alterman linked to his Media Matters site rather than repeat the racist and sexist argument of Novak under his own byline. There, you can read Novak’s argument, now endorsed by Alterman:
NOVAK: Republicans are very pessimistic about 2008. When you talk to them off the record, they don't see how they can win this thing. And then they think for a minute, and only the Democratic Party, with everything in their favor, would say that, "OK, this is the year either to have a woman or an African-American to break precedent, to do things the country has never done before." And it gives the Republicans hope.
When Novak says it, the statement is seen in its full naked Cromagnon glory: Clinton is reduced to her gender and Obama to his pigmentation. And Republicans, given the chance to run a campaign based on bigotry, turn from despairing to hopeful.
This is so ridiculous because both those candidates have already broken the molds of stereotype and showed themselves to be multi-dimensional living and breathing human beings and leaders, and that’s a big part of why they are, today, ahead of the field. (And polls reveal that Clinton beats Edwards among men and Obama beats Edwards among Caucasians, which makes the Alterman-Novak argument largely moot.)
I, for one, grow weary of the “liberal racism and sexism” thrown against Clinton and Obama masquerading as concerns over “electability” especially when, from the likes of Alterman, the “electability” question is exclusively tied to gender and racial prejudice.
At least the conservative Novak could say what he meant but the liberal Alterman had to shroud his own “identity politics” (a white male saying only a white male can get elected president does suggest adherence to a particularly privileged form of “identity politics” even by those that claim to dislike them) in his cowardly link to Novak’s column.
Bigotry is not the exclusive realm of one political party or one side of the ideological spectrum (we saw plenty of evidence of that during the immigration reform debate last month in which some Republicans and some Democrats could not see millions of undocumented workers as human beings and voted barbarically to maintain them in sub-human “illegal” status).
Each candidate’s “electability” will be determined by how each of them responds to difficulty and crisis (such as how Bill Clinton responded, in 1992, to what his opponents termed as draft-dodging and womanizing, bouncing back from sensational adversity to become the Comeback Kid).
Campaigns put tests and obstacles in each rival’s path. How Obama, for example, responds to the flap over his alleged favoring of “sex ed for kindergarten kids,” and how Clinton and Edwards respond to getting caught on microphone seeking to exclude other candidates from debates are telling us more about each of them, and their “electability,” than their race or gender ever could.
What the candidate looks like doesn’t determine whether he or she will be elected: It’s whether the candidate has “the right stuff” on the inside that decides whether voters will consider that person to be ready for prime time.
Debate and discuss “electability” based on those factors, not based on gender or race. And when the Altermans and Novaks of punditry inevitably pop up with their simplistic appeals to racism and sexism, supporters of the candidates they claim are most “electable” would do well to vocally distance themselves from such backward and bigoted notions. This may well be the election when such outmoded conventional myths are buried for good.