Sometime during the 2008 presidential campaign, I was a guest on a program broadcast by a historically black college’s radio station. We were talking about the lively contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
We went to the phones. Most of the callers’ questions were in line with my expectations, but one threw me for a loop. Why, I was asked, wasn’t the media talking about Hillary Clinton’s belief that the Bible teaches white supremacy?
A bit surprised, I replied that it was likely because Clinton had never expressed such a belief. The caller told me I was wrong and claimed she had said so in a speech. Later, I found out that she had actually said some people had wrongly used the Bible to justify white supremacy. Someone was circulating a selectively edited clip that took the line out of context.
The line came to mind this week after Clinton’s New Hampshire exchange with Black Lives Matter activists. During the conversation, the Democratic front-runner urged the movement to formulate concrete policy goals.
When she was told this was a form of “victim-blaming” because violence against blacks is a white problem, she shot back, “Respectfully, if that is your position, then I will talk only to white people about how we are going to deal with the very real problems.”
In a way it was a bold statement. Bernie Sanders has been forced off the stage by Black Lives Matter protestors. Martin O’Malley was forced to apologize for saying, in essence, that human lives matter regardless of race. Clinton held her campaign event on her own terms, conversed with the activists and stood her ground when challenged.
You might even call it a Sister Souljah moment of sorts, a way of pushing back against elements of the left that are framing legitimate issues about the criminal justice system’s treatment of African-Americans in ways that are themselves corrosive to racial equality and harmony.
But do Sister Souljah moments necessarily work in today’s Democratic Party? It’s not hard to imagine how “I will only talk to white people” could be problematic if taken out of context. If any Republican had said that, it would lead every network news broadcast, possibly for weeks, no matter what the overall point was.
In a different Democratic campaign, it would probably come back to haunt Hillary. Sanders and O’Malley are obviously not going to be able to use it against her. But we forget that eight years ago, her husband went from someone who could rebuke the rapper Sister Souljah and still be celebrated as America’s first black president to someone who stood accused of practicing incendiary racial politics.
Bill Clinton eventually dismissed Obama’s win in South Carolina, where his wife had lost the black vote by nearly 60 points, by noting that Jesse Jackson had won there too. He was quoted at different points as saying that Obama would have once fetched him coffee or carried his bags. And he accused the Obama camp of playing the race card against him.
Soon Hillary’s numbers among black voters looked more like she was still a Goldwater girl in the aftermath of the Arizona senator’s vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than the wife of a former president who had been popular in the black community.
That’s not likely to happen this time around. But Clinton is going to have to replicate the Obama coalition from 2008 and 2012, something that depends on high minority turnout, and the white liberals in the 2016 Democratic field have seemed surprisingly ham-fisted in this area.
Democrats no doubt hope that the nonstop conversation about Donald Trump will prevent Republicans from taking advantage of any of this, though Trump’s racially tinged controversies have generally involved Latinos more than blacks. And perhaps that will be good enough. The Democrats aren’t in any danger of losing any large bloc of nonwhite voters to the Republicans.
But Obama-level turnout and enthusiasm still can’t be taken for granted. It’s the most obvious difference between the two presidential elections the Democrats have won and the two midterm elections they have just as convincingly lost.
Diverse coalitions can produce big majorities. They also require more maintenance, as they can be more complicated to hold together.
Despite their decades of popularity among African-American voters, the Clintons have often triangulated against the perceived interests of minority communities when it was politically beneficial and when doing so addressed core liabilities of the Democratic Party. They might avoid these practices now that the demographics and those liabilities are different, but 2008 shows how quickly even a deep reservoir of goodwill can run dry.
