THE THINGS PEOPLE SAY. You know, something about this Democratic presidential contest is bringing out the worst in people. 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. That’s why he was throwing his lot in with Edwards.
Similar conversations are happening in campaign circles all over Washington, I am told. And I’ve witnessed some, too. The men who work for the white male candidates keep getting into arguments with the men (and a few women) who work for the African-American and female contenders about who has the better candidate. That’s all perfectly normal inter-campaign banter and part of the regular intramural ribbing that goes on behind the scenes. But then the conversations inevitably start to devolve into arguments about how only white men have a shot at winning. That’s new, and kind of 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, but in their less guarded moments, boy do they say some painfully blunt things.
–Garance Franke-Ruta