I encounter it much more frequently than ever these days -- a seething, barely-contained rage that convulses some black people when they talk about the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.
This is the Obama base -- frustrated by his recent reversals and, frankly, running a little bit scared. They worry that, despite all the analysis showing that Clinton has virtually no chance of winning the nomination, the cards are stacked against Obama and the house will find a way to win. "They are going to change the rules, you watch," one man told me.
Some of these people say things about Hillary Clinton, her husband, and sometimes her daughter that are so harsh they bring back memories of the worst Republican attacks of the 1990s. Some of them are even Democratic operatives who once loved the Clintons, only to turn completely against them during this campaign.
Black anger at the Clintons has even spread to the top of the Democratic Party. Black Congressman Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, told The New York Times Thursday night that "black people are incensed over all of this."
Black disenchantment with the Clintons began to take shape after the primary contest in Clyburn's home state of South Carolina in March when Bill Clinton famously diminished Obama's win by equating it to Jesse Jackson's South Carolina win in 1984. Clyburn says that, after South Carolina, black people, almost unanimously, think that the Clintons are "committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win."
This is the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives.
Personally, I believe that Clinton has earned the right to fight on as long as she wants, despite the racial subtext of her recent success, and I think Obama owes it to Democrats to beat her decisively and unite the party. Knockouts are not arguable. That apparently is not in the cards, so the ugliness will continue and it will get worse.
Contemplating the "what if" of a Clinton victory is instructive, if only for the vitriol it unmasks. "I will never vote Democratic again in my life," said one 50-something-year-old black man I know.
I have been taken aback by the depth of the anger, especially among people whose political maturity would have suggested a more measured response. The anger has gotten so visceral it forces the question not just of whether blacks would support Clinton in a fall campaign, but whether a Clinton win would lose Democrats the support of the next generation of black voters alltogether.
As I have said before, what the loser of the primary says after he or she drops out will be as important to victory in November as who the winner is. That was in February, however. Today, Clinton is almost certainly going to be the person making that all-important concession speech. Her all-or-nothing approach to the nomination suggests that she may not care much about her political career if she cannot be president, but, if she does, she is going to have trouble putting the old Clinton coalition back together without African Americans.
Clinton seems to believe that no matter how much damage she inflicts on Obama and the party to win the nomination she will survive because McCain will be fatally weakened by an ailing economy and an unpopular war. Clinton seems unwilling to pass up such a chance.
But the Clintons do not seem to understand that the kind of revulsion they are generating in what was once the heart of their base is not your garden-variety political frustration. It is born out of a historical anger that requires 25 minutes in the supermarket aisle or 900 words on the op-ed page of the New York Times to explain. The idea that Obama, having played by all the rules and won by all the traditional measures, could lose the nomination because of Clinton's argument that he is unelectable because he is black, is profoundly revolting to many black people.
The angst about white working-class voters and their influence in the battleground states has convinced many that, despite the seeming improbability of a Clinton triumph, Obama will not be allowed to win, because, in the end, he is black.
This is too cynical for me, but Clinton's argument that Obama is not electable because he does not appeal the working class white voters, feeds prejudices in order to benefit from them. Racism doesn't need racists to succeed.
Not that many black people are making that distinction these days.
