Why Does Hillary Clinton Fear Condoleezza Rice?
by Walter Williams (March 8, 2006)
Capitalism Magazine
Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton used Rev. Al Sharpton's Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration to, as Professor Shelby Steele explains, "whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance." In response to a question from the audience: "I need you to tell us what distinguishes Democrats from Republicans right now," Sen. Clinton answered, "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about . . . " Though the audience was largely black, I doubt whether any of the attendees had any plantation experience.
Sen. Clinton was simply employing the Democrats' political rope-a-dope for blacks. As Professor Steele asks in his Wall Street Journal editorial, "Hillary's Plantation": "Must blacks have their slave past rubbed in their face simply for Hillary Clinton to make a little hay against modern-day Republicans?" Steele also asks, "Does she really see us as she projects us -- as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist?"
Sen. Clinton is not alone with such demeaning pandering. Before a predominantly black audience, during his 2004 presidential bid, Sen. John Kerry said, in reference to so many more blacks in prison than college, "That's unacceptable, but it's not their fault." Aside from Kerry being factually wrong about more blacks being in prison than in college, his vision differs little from one that holds blacks as a rudderless, victimized people who cannot control their destiny and whose best hope depends upon the benevolence of white people. I wonder whether Kerry would have told a white audience that jailed white people were faultless. Kerry's other black-audience-only gambit was seen after he addressed the NAACP's 95th annual convention in Philadelphia; he gave the audience the black power clenched-fist salute.
The subtitle to Professor Steele's article is "Hillary Clinton reveals her fear of Condi Rice." He explains that Democrat liberalism has survived decades past the credibility of its ideas because it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of its power. That power will be gone the very day that a significant number of blacks cease to be a people of grievance. This is potentially a Republican advantage. The Democrats and the liberal establishment know that, which is why they vilify high-profile blacks who aren't filled with resentment and grievance.
There are quite a few blacks in charge of stoking the fires of resentment and grievance. First, there's former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, who said of George W. Bush, "We have a president that's prepared to take us back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and dominance." NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said President Bush has appeased "the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and has chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Rev. Jesse Jackson regaled black audiences by telling them that a Bush win would turn the civil rights clock back to the days of Jim Crow. No one bothers to question these people about the accuracy of their predictions.
If Condoleezza Rice threw her hat into the presidential race, it would be Clinton's worse nightmare. Ms. Rice's vision represents triumph rather than grievance. Steele says that by growing up in the segregated South, Ms. Rice might have claimed title to a grievance identity, but she's chosen the older black tradition where blacks neither deny injustice nor permit themselves to be defined by it. Blacks like Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice are of no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party. Why? If blacks come to embrace triumph, rather than grievance, the wound to liberal Democrats would be mortal. It wouldn't take much of a desertion of the black vote to make Democrat hopes of recapturing Washington a permanent pipe dream.
hile Walter Williams is correct--missus clinton's racism plays a role in her fear of Condi Rice--there is another, equally important factor: Condi's credentials and competence and incorruptibility and likeability and elegance... and her achievements not dependent on some man's coattails. Condi's presence puts hillary's unworthiness for higher office--indeed for any office--in stark relief.
These are not ordinary times. America is waging the global War on Terror; the uncharted territory of asymmetric netherworlds is the battlefield; the enemy is brutal, subhuman; the threat of global conflagration is real.
Defeating the enemy isn't sufficient. For America to prevail, she must also defeat a retrograde, misogynous mindset. To successfully prosecute the War on Terror, it is essential that the collective patriarchal islamic culture perceives America as politically and militarily strong. Condi Rice excepted, this requirement presents an insurmountable hurdle for any female presidential candidate, and especially missus clinton, historically antimilitary--(an image, incidentally, that is only enhanced today by her clumsy, termagant parody of Thatcher), forever the pitiful victim, and, according to Dick Morris, "the biggest dove in the clinton administration."
It is ironic that had the clintons not failed utterly to fight terrorism... not failed to take bin Laden from Sudan... not failed repeatedly to decapitate a nascent, still stoppable al Qaeda... the generic female president as a construct would still be viable... missus clinton's obstacles would be limited largely to standard-issue clintonisms: corruption, abuse, malpractice, malfeasance, megalomania, rape and treason... and, in spite of Juanita Broaddrick, or perhaps because of her, Rod Lurie would be reduced to perversely hawking the "First Gentleman" instead of the "Commander-in-Chief."
Mia T, 10.02.05 |
J. Bradford DeLong
Too many pundits, usually leftist and privileged, sneer at country music. To these critics, any music created by poor, Southern whites (at least those poor, Southern whites who didn't attend an Ivy League university) must be held in contempt, along with its correlatives: incest, racism and trailer parks.
Hillary Clinton? Who would even know her name were it not for her attachment to a man? Where would she be now if she as a child had to pick cotton from sun up to sun down?
Tammy Wynette stands alone, a legend; and she will be admired wherever people appreciate the honesty of the human experience. Human beings are vulnerable. We all should be thankful to any artist courageous enough to bare her soul on the public stage so the rest of us who are listening and know whereof she speaks might benefit.
Sean Smith
Clinton Administration Veteran:
"Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life."
My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.... there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.
professor of economics, Berkeley
clinton Administration veteran
Hillary Clinton?
Who would even know her name were it not for her attachment to a man?
Thank you, Gavin McNett, for your tribute to the incomparable Tammy Wynette. (TAMMY WYNETTE, 1942-1998)
Fresno, Calif.
Salon.com
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The clintons, as is their wont, are now taking this 
took it on.
