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Campaign Avoided Racial Warfare

Howard Fineman

You knew it was going to happen. I’m only surprised it took so long.

In Pennsylvania, Sen. John McCain’s must-win blue state, local Republicans now are up with a TV ad linking Sen. Barack Obama to his former pastor, the corrosively race-based Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The ad plays Wright’s familiar “no, no, no” and “KKK” clips from incendiary sermons, and asks how Obama could ever have countenanced the guy. In fact, Obama no longer does. The split was final.

The McCain campaign distanced itself from the ad, insisting that they didn’t approve of--but could not prevent--the spot being aired.

But here is the good news, and I don’t mean for either campaign but for the entire country: so far as I know, the ad was the first of its kind to be sponsored by a state party or other above-ground entity.

Obama’s longtime relationship with Wright--and especially the Illinois senator’s shaded and reluctant characterizations of it--may be valid topics of debate. But McCain and the GOP largely have stayed away from the subject.

And that is a good thing. There are plenty of other topics to discuss.

I am willing--we all should be willing--to give McCain the benefit of the doubt on his motives. True, he voted against the Martin Luther King holiday a quarter century ago, and, in this year’s South Carolina primary, he allied himself with some of the same operatives who savaged him on racial grounds (over his adoptive daughter from Bangladesh) when he ran against George W. Bush in 2000.

But I know McCain and know that he does not have a racist molecule in his body, and that he is no fan, at heart, of the kind of politics that pokes at racial or religious sore spots in someone else’s life.

Not that McCain’s approach was solely selfless heroism. He and his aides knew that to have done otherwise--to have plunged headfirst into the pit with Wright--was risky and might engender a huge backlash that would have cost McCain more votes than it won.

However you view McCain and the GOP’s motives--whatever the mix of nobility and calculation--the bottom line is this: the country has changed. There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, when you could run on race or religion or both. You can’t do it anymore.

I was thinking about all this as I head to New York on Amtrak for election night. I ignored the East Coast industrial vistas as I remember a frigid February day in 2007 in the Illinois town of Springfield.

Obama, a young man by the standards of presidential politics, strode onto a sunlit stage outside the Old State Capitol that day and declared his candidacy and his intention to make history.

Echoes of Lincoln were everywhere, and yet the young voters gathered to hear him didn’t care. They saw in him only a new generation--their generation--and did not seem to be interested in, or even know about, the burdens of the past summoned by the scene.

Like sunflowers facing the sun, Americans tend to face toward the future. Our amnesia can be a maddening, dangerous thing. It condemns us to repeat mistakes (some bad wars and economic bubbles). But it also is our salvation. We are always behaving in new ways that prior generations would have considered inconceivable.

There are many conclusions to be drawn from this riveting, revealing election--certainly the most intriguing campaign in decades.

But let me focus on this: Whoever wins the election, this country can be proud of the way it has, for the most part, conducted itself in the process this year.

Our great strength--and, sometimes, our great weakness--is our diversity: racial, religious, ethnic, regional. Our energy and creativity derives from the diversity, but so does the pain and chaos.

And yet, unless there is a cataclysmic change in the tenor of the contest in the last 24 hours, most of the discussion has been well within the bounds of our rancorous tradition of campaign politics.

You can argue that this was, at times, a victory of political correctness over free speech and valid inquiry. But this contest has not produced the kind of racial and regional warfare--and I mean, literally, warfare--that we might have expected only a few decades ago.

What is so remarkable is how unremarkable it seems. Yes, race was a factor. But it was not a combustible one.

There is no question that Obama used his race mixed-race heritage as a calling card when it suited him. He continued to do so up to Election Day. His speech at a late rally in Cleveland, for example, resounded with civil-rights era language of crusade and struggle, a message aimed the city’s large African-American electorate.

Was any of that out of bounds? No. Every “ethnic” politician for 150 years (starting with the Irish in New York) has used the same approach. And Obama has been careful to speak in double-layered universal terms, and rarely if ever in specifically racial ones.

It’s also true that Obama used some race-based tactics in the trenches, especially in the South Carolina primary against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. (I love the people but there is something about that state which draws out the worst in our politics.) In the heat of the battle, Obama cried “racism” in pre-emptory fashion: quick, barely justified glancing jabs that infuriated Bill Clinton.

Obama, and the Clintons for that matter, could have done much worse.

But they didn’t, and that is the story--the real story--of the 2008 campaign.

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Posted By: Anonymous (November 7, 2008 at 2:58 AM)

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Posted By: Anonymous (November 6, 2008 at 10:17 PM)

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Posted By: motorider (November 6, 2008 at 5:02 PM)

I will admit i dont listen to what presidential canidates say or keep up with their views as much as some. But this should have been the only issues. DO THEY BELIEVE IN GOD AND WOULD THEY GIVE THEIR LIFE FOR THEIR LOVE OF AMERICA. OBVIOUSLY a lot of you did not do your homework and only voted for his color.

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