Clinton’s invoking of the RFK assassination, perhaps unconsciously, is actually apt in an unintended way. Kennedy was killed in the maelstrom of the 1960s era, just six weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Obama now comes forward as the soon to be Democratic nominee in a time of turmoil as well. The storms are under the surface this time within the U.S. – at least for now.
The muffled screams of someone being tortured, however, are coming from the house next door in this, on the surface, quiet suburban American dreamscape.
The fact that both a woman and a black have been vying for the Democratic nomination – with each of them having a legitimate chance of becoming the next president in the same election cycle - is an unprecedented situation. Their mutual candidacies are no more a coincidence than the fact that this presidential race started far earlier than any, ever.
There’s an urgent need, felt by both major parties, to distract and derail peoples’ desires to censure and repudiate Bush and Cheney and the policies that they have spearheaded.
Obama clearly has fulfilled his role to date.
Clinton, on the other hand, has gone from the invincible front-runner to the black knight in Monty Python’s classic film that keeps on fighting even though he’s lost his arms and legs.
The fact that she’s the first woman to have a legitimate shot at the presidency is not and has not proven by itself to be enough of a departure from the emergent fascist norms of this time to draw millions to her.
Hillary is, in her heart of hearts, a centrist Democrat, which in today’s terms means, among other things, openly declaring that she’ll “totally obliterate” Iran. Can you imagine even Bush saying something this bellicose on the public record? I can’t.
Clinton’s approach hasn’t appealed to the millions who make up the Democrats’ social base, and who are yearning for an alternative to the White House criminals in the way that the oratorically gifted, “change we can believe in” promising, Obama can.
But – and here’s the rub – the very fact that the political leadership class must trot out a black man to try to rope millions back into the killing embrace of electoral politics and the two party system, millions who would otherwise be entertaining and acting upon more radical and realistic steps that could actually do something meaningful, means also that they are playing with fire on the other side, among the hoary, unreconstructed and unrepentant, racists and other ghosts and goblins of the extremist right: those who use the word “nigger” without apology and, as readily as they down their beers, crack “jokes” about violence meted out to their enemies, or, among the more well-to-do reactionaries, as easily as they tie their bowties.
For these people, the very idea that a black man could be president sends them into paroxysms of fury.
It’s even too much for Hillary and Bill Clinton – the latter the former “first black president” - who have shown that they will do anything and say anything (and say it again in case you didn’t get it the first time) to have a shot at being in the White House again.
White racism burns too brightly in America, especially when it has been getting stoked by the White House and its minions and loudmouths on Fox, in talk radio, and by the theocratic fascist movement.
They have been assiduously fanning the flames of bigotry, xenophobia, hatred of women, know nothingism, and all around reaction across the board.
The new fascist norms that Bush and Cheney and their enablers and fellow movement leaders have been forcefully, belligerently and rapidly instituting cannot be accomplished without also creating an atmosphere of fear and loathing in the country.
