Politics or Movements?

At this stage, the race for the Democratic nomination presents a mystery, at least to me. The numbers show an incredibly close race, impossible to win except with superdelegates and even then, it is very difficult to predict. And yet, at least in my part of the blue-state, bicoastal, overeducated world, the loudest voices insist that Obama has all but “won.”

The tally is extremely close. Obama leads in pledged delegates, helped in particular by the votes he has won in caucus states versus Hillary’s wins in major swing states. Nonetheless, the Obama camp is relentless in its assertion that there is only one fair, principled way to resolve this mess: The superdelegates should vote as a body according to “the will of the people.” The unstated logic is that the movement that has grown up around Obama is all: movement must trump politics.

I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in political movements, in the rumblings from below that catch fire, grow exponentially, and change people’s willingness to take action in public life. But I also believe in regular politics. Eventually, a movement must work in and through electoral politics.

Last week, I spoke to an audience at Central Washington University about the heroic battle that American women had to fight before they were able to vote. Literally generations of women gave their energies—mothers, daughters, granddaughters—before the federal constitution was amended to ban disenfranchisement by sex. The victory reflected the longest, most hard fought, most popular, grassroots movement in American history.

Most of the audience listened, politely and with interest. But those who spoke were skeptical. Why should the battle for women’s political rights excite modern women? It was just the vote? Why am I not telling them about something that “real” women cared about: working conditions and wages, reproductive rights, childcare, domestic violence?

Even my doubters know as well as I do that women would remain nonpersons in this or any society if they were shut out from the workings of electoral democracy. But the cynicism about electoral politics pioneered by my own 1960s generation, the amulet of principle that we raised against the pragmatism of electoral politics, continues to run deep. Obama’s magic is that he can campaign for the highest office in the land while seeming not to be the clever and ambitious politicians that he is.

Very relevant in this regard is the media-inflamed flap over Hillary Clinton’s comments about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon Johnson. The controversy embodies a disturbing confusion between politics and movements. Clinton’s words—“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964”–began the cascade of charges that she would do anything to win the nomination.

The New York Times called her words “baffling” and “distasteful,” and suggested that they were meant to imply that “a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change.” Bill Moyers, principled liberal extraordinaire and former assistant to President Johnson, defended her and the point she was making about the relationship of vision and politics. “King marched, Johnson maneuvered,” Moyers pointed out.

Clinton’s comments were obvious, as close to fact as you can come when talking about history. King himself made concessions to political realities, including agreeing to the Democratic National Committee decision not to seat Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation at the 1964 national convention. I remember at the time how contemptuous young radicals were of King for his lack of principle, his “playing politics.”

The movement that has helped to propel Obama’s candidacy flourishes among young people. Being uncompromising, untrammeled by history, and politically perfectionist goes with the territory of youth. And a good thing it is. But it is not enough. Those of us who have been through these things before know that hopes for social change can either be realized or squandered in the legislative arena. It is our job to convey that knowledge. Hillary is running on experience, and after all these years, that’s what I’m counting on as well.

Like youth and experience, movements and politics have different roles to play in the complex matter of governance. A suffrage movement didn’t get women political power after the 19th Amendment; for that we needed female politicians. The feminist movement of the late 1960s made huge changes in culture, but the handful of laws hammered out in Congress—Titles VII and IX—proved, along with Roe v. Wade, to be among feminism’s most sturdy achievements.

In the latest polls, Clinton rates higher among voters in terms of understanding the concrete issues threatening this country—housing foreclosures, economic slowdown, the health care crisis. But Obama scores higher on “trustworthiness” and “represents change.” Her dropping “trust” ratings are pinned most concretely to her inflated account of the immediate danger she faced when flying into an Air Force base in Bosnia in 1996. As the Washington Post acknowledges, that single incident gains traction on the basis of the relentless assault against her by the Republicans especially in the first Clinton administration.

The result, I believe, is that where Hillary Clinton is concerned the trust issue goes beyond any single incident. It points to a continuing repudiation of politics. By definition, politicians aren’t trustworthy because they accommodate their principles to political realities—and to their own ambitions.

As for the call for change, it seems to involve lumping the Bush and Bill Clinton presidencies into one failed epoch of partisan wrangling and legislative paralysis. I remember Bill Clinton in 1992 as a new face from outside the beltway who promised to find a third way between party extremes. If there is anything I have learned since then, it is that the call for change is the most unchanging part of American electoral politics.

Obama may be riding a movement, but in the end he is doing politics. So are his supporters, whether they recognize it or not. Movements can often be imagined as pure and incorruptible whereas politics cannot. King knew that, and Hillary Clinton knows it. Is the Obama phenomenon ready for the compromises, manipulations, and disappointments that go along with politics?

Ellen Carol DuBois is professor of history at UCLA and co-author of Through Women’s Eyes: An American History.