Victim Politics: After Texas and Ohio

Victim Politics: After Texas and Ohio

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WITH HILLARY Clinton’s victories in Texas and Ohio, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has drawn even closer. It is a situation that offers liberal Democrats reason to be hopeful about the 2008 election. Democrats are going to the polls in record numbers. They are outspending Republicans, and their political agenda is getting the lion’s share of attention from the media.

But instead of being cheered by the Clinton-Obama campaigns, there is reason for Democrats to worry that what they have on their hands is a victimization primary that will hurt them in the fall. Instead of emphasizing the common ground they share, Clinton and Obama are exaggerating the differences between them and, according to news reports, more and more of their hard core supporters are vowing they won’t support the winning candidate if their candidate loses the Democratic nomination.

With the Clinton camp arguing that it is time to have a woman president and the Obama camp arguing that it is time to have a black president, Democrats have on their hands an un-winnable debate over the past. If Clinton triumphs, the arguments goes, voters are turning their backs on racism. If Obama triumphs, the counterargument goes, voters are turning their backs on sexism.

It’s Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem versus Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King. The empathy each side should have for the other is lost in the race to become Victim Number One.

“How do liberals form a firing line? They get themselves in a circle?” the old political joke goes. There is, unfortunately, no remedy for how liberals avoid suicidal politics. But in the wake of Texas and Ohio, there is a reality check that Democrats might want to make. They should start by remembering that once Clinton and Obama began college, they lost their personal claims to victimhood. They have both had elite educations and early access to the highest circles of power. Wellesley, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, these are the schools that have nourished Clinton and Obama. Just as there is no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks reminded us in A League of their Own, there should be no crying over the obstacles Clinton and Obama have had to overcome since they turned eighteen.

But most of all, what liberals and those running the Clinton and Obama campaigns need to remember is that the only winner in a destructive, identity-politics Democratic primary will be a Republican party that ever since the 1960s has done its best to defend the rich and the powerful and undermine civil rights gains for blacks, women, and immigrants.

Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. Photos: (Friedan) Library of Congress; (Clinton) U.S. Senate; (King) Library of Congress; (Obama) Creative Commons/ transplanted mountaineer.