"There almost seems to be a conspiracy," "There almost seems to be a conspiracy," observes Jonathan Chait, "dedicated to convincing us that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable Democratic nominee for president." Almost? It rather clearly seems to me that there is such a conspiracy, though "conspiracy" is perhaps an unduly inflammatory word. Rather, there are a group of people out there -- roughly speaking the people who want her to be the Democratic nominee -- deliberately trying to foster this belief.
And why shouldn't they? It is, after all, an effective tactic. Clinton's quest for the nomination, after all, hinges in part on the liberal base with whom she's popular not noticing that she isn't especially liberal. This is much easier to do if the leaders of liberal institutions don't point it out to anyone. And, again, it'll be much easier to prevent liberal institutions from criticizing Clinton if they believe she's going to win anyway. After all, if she does win, those very same groups will come calling asking her and her staff for favors. In politics, there's no point in opposing inevitable candidates, so everyone wants the inevitable label.
But as Chait argues, there's very little reason to believe her ascendancy actually is inevitable. What's more, thanks to Joe Biden's inept interview with The New York Observer's Jason Horowitz, it just got a little less inevitable last week. Here's why.
From the beginning, one key plank in the Clinton inevitability narrative has been the allegedly unique and enormous depth of support she enjoys in the African-American community. Clinton-as-black-heroine is an image New York's junior senator has long sought to cultivate, dating all the way back the prehistory of her Senate campaign, when Representative Charles Rangle was first made the dedicated floater of the idea of her candidacy and then Al Sharpton's ring was duly -- and repeatedly -- kissed in a manner consonant with New York traditions but deeply at odds with the traditional triangulating approach of her political team. The problem now, obviously, is that a somewhat improbable series of events made Barack Obama first the Democratic nominee for Senate in Illinois, then the junior senator from Illinois, and then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in all but name. A black candidate in the race, clearly, stands a good chance of fatally undercutting Clinton's presumed strength with this voting bloc.
Curiously enough, however, a meme has arisen to explain why this may not happen. "No Lock on Black Voters for Obama," reported the Associated Press on January 29, taking a gander at a three-month-old AP poll showing Clinton leading Obama in African-American support. Though Clinton's much higher nationwide name recognition would seem to account for her lead, the article offered an alternative theoretical explanation for Obama's weakness among black voters, quoting David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political Studies saying, "I think [Obama] will get substantial support from blacks, but not all blacks. Some black voters are going to find him -- what? Too white."
And, indeed, one can call Obama's African American cred into question. Debra Dickerson, writing in Salon, argued that Obama "would be the great black hope in the next presidential race -- if he were actually black." Obama, after all, was raised by his white mother. His black father, meanwhile, was an immigrant from East Africa, not the descendant of slaves from West Africa. Why this makes him less black than Clinton was a mystery to me, but at any rate, Biden's remark has reminded us that Obama -- notwithstanding the ways in which his background is different from that of the typical African American -- is black in the way that matters most: the color of his skin.
Biden observed that Obama was not only the "first mainstream African-American candidate" (thus excluding from that category Jesse Jackson, who certainly got closer to a presidential nomination than Biden ever will) but also "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," precisely the same condescending phrase a mildly racist person would apply to any appropriately-hued person he was ham-handedly trying to praise. Kenyan ancestry and a white mom, in other words, didn't save Obama from Biden any more than they would save him from a "driving while black" car stop. That, after all, is the essence of racism, whether in a virulent form or in the relatively mild one Biden was exhibiting -- the point is precisely that the racist mindset doesn't see the subtle differences in background and personality that define us all, instead choosing to see people largely through the lens of their skin color. Any NBA fan who's seen the relatively recent influx of black European players (Tony Parker, Boris Diaw, Ronnie Turiaf, etc.) into the league could have predicted this: commentators apply the preexisting stereotypes about black players to them rather than the preexisting stereotypes about European players.
Obviously, there's more to the African-American experience than this sort of thoughtless treatment at the hands of white people. But in terms of politics, it's an important piece of the puzzle. Dickerson wrote that Obama "steps into the benefits of black progress (like Harvard Law School) without having borne any of the burden." That, however, would be true of any black person Obama's age irrespective of ancestry. And as Biden helped to show, Obama is black enough to bear the burdens of the progress that hasn't been made yet. My strong guess is that'll be black enough for African-American voters.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
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