On Hard Working (a.k.a. White) Americans
May 9, 2008
I know I said that my disgust with Hillary Clinton is softening somewhat, but it hasn’t disappeared altogether. Andy did a pretty good job of encapsulating the appropriate level of outrage regarding Hillary Clinton’s comments about white Americans preferring her to Senator Obama, but I have something to add.
Clinton’s comment goes like this:
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
The comment — aside from its blatant pandering to identity politics — reveals something profoundly disturbing about our culture. Somewhere along the line, we have developed a notion that working-class, white Americans — that is, white people who have not graduated from college — are somehow so much more American and more hard-working than the rest of us.
This is the same set of cultural norms that treats wearing a flag pin and reciting the pledge of allegiance — complete with the “under God” — as the apex of patriotism. It’s a dangerous culture that brought us the flagrant anti-intellectualism of the Bush years and has led Hillary Clinton to declare the she doesn’t want to “throw her lot in” with economists who make excellent criticisms of her plan to suspend the gas tax.
This fall, Senator McCain will wage just such a campaign against Senator Obama. He will play to our fears of globalization and of terrorism and our changing world. Senator Obama will offer us a realistic, reasonable view of the future.
All Americans — indeed, all humans — of all backgrounds will need to come to grips with the value of that perspective in short order if we are to match the great challenges we face: stabilizing world political issues, preserving our planet, repairing and advancing our global economy, and eliminating disease, poverty, and famine.
The only thing we can hope, and what Obama seems to be optimistic about, is that the American people are sufficiently sick of being treated like idiots that they’ll reject the appeals to our fears and instead choose to be inspired by our hopes.
McCain has already started out playing that game very, very poorly. He has no nuance or deftness. He wields those arguments like a club, rather than as a scalpel, the way they need to be to be effective. Here’s hoping he doesn’t learn to wield them any better