A QUESTION. Tonight the Democratic presidential field holds its first primary debate in South Carolina, moderated by Brian Williams of NBC. If I were asking questions, I’d ask a question about the conversation that everyone has but no one will admit to having, and what each candidate would say to those who are having it.
You know the conversation, because whether you wanted to or not, you’ve had it, too. An example: I was talking with a culturally liberal friend recently who is not in politics and who asked me who I thought would win in 2008. It seemed like a normal enough conversational opener. I hazarded a guess that right now it looks like it could be a Democrat.
“But which one?” my friend asked, sounding skeptical. “Obama was raised in a madrassa. Hillary has a vagina. And Edwards is the Breck Girl.” He didn’t think any of them had a good shot.
Taken aback, I countered, “But Obama wasn’t raised in a Madrassa.” My friend looked at me as though I were a child. “He’s black and he grew up in Indonesia,” he said, fixing me with his eyes and wrinkling his nose. “It doesn’t matter.”
Another friend, a progressive leader, said something in a similar vein on a different occasion. “Barack Obama is more likely to be shot than elected president,” he told me. “And you can quote me on that.” As for Hillary, well, she’s a woman, and America wasn’t going to elect one president, either (and especially not her). That’s why he was throwing his lot in with Edwards.
These sorts of arguments are not part of anyone’s official campaign strategy. But they are often invoked by people within the Democratic fold to make a case for particular candidates, usually one of the white male ones. Inter-campaign banter and intramural ribbing is a perfectly normal part of what goes on behind the scenes. But, this cycle, the conversations all too often devolve into arguments about whether or not only white men have a shot at winning, and, therefore, why their race and gender should be reasons not to support candidates. That’s new, and can be extremely discomfiting.
There’s a fine line between making hard-nosed political assessments and using long-standing social biases as political ammunition against historic candidacies. The first is necessary, the second is unseemly. People are still groping their way around how to talk about all of this.
I suspect that, if asked, the candidates themselves would public refute this kind of talk, and perhaps try to elevate the overall discourse. I wish someone would.
–Garance Franke-Ruta
