June 25, 2019--Biden's Sister Souljah Moment

As is his propensity, last week Joe Biden stepped in it.

But then again, perhaps he didn't. 

This flap, significantly taken out of context, was from something he said when Vice President, in a commencement address at Yale in 2015. Among many things he spoke about how when he was in the Senate he attempted to work directly with even other senators who were avowed segregationists and racists to advance important legislation.

Some of his current rivals, though acknowledging he is not himself a racist, claimed he minimally showed insensitivity to people of color who do not look back to that Jim Crow era with any sense of nostalgia or bipartisan clubbiness. Among others, sensing a political opportunity, Cory Booker called on Biden to apologize.

That really got under Biden's skin.

He fired back, "Apologize for what? He knows better. I don't have a racist bone in my body."

I suspect the old Joe would have tied himself up in knots of contrition and squeezed out a version of a self-righteous apology. But not this Joe. He doubled down. Tripled down. And in at least two regards this may have been the politically smart thing to do.

Voters this time around are looking for feistiness not wimpiness, confrontation not nuance. Even many liberals who pride themselves on being measured and understanding--never hot under the collar, no drama--more than anything want their candidate to be able to go toe-to-toe with Trump and take him down. After that, we can get back to seeking dialogue and reasonableness in the hope that maybe we can get a few legislative things done. Like fixing Obamacare and Social Security. Like doing something about our collapsing infrastructure. Like rebuilding our standing in the world.

For any of this to happen, assuming the Dems capture the White House and retain their majority in the House, it will be essential to figure out ways to work across the aisle with at least a half dozen Republicans. Biden by insisting on his ability to do this is boldly putting the spectrum of his political history out for review. Admittedly, some of it is on the compromised side.

Related, but more complicated, if he is to recapture some of the white, blue-collar vote that last time went overwhelmingly to Trump and more than anything else put him in the White House, he needs to demonstrate that though he is responsive to voters of color and progressive in other ways, he will not allow himself to become their agent. 

So this current flap could turn out to be Biden's Sister Souljah Moment. The original was in 1992 when Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee. He was at risk of being perceived as pandering excessively to black voters as part of his strategy to win at least a few southern states, but in the process he risked alienating enough moderate white voters to lose to incumbent George H.W. Bush.

For those of you who do not recall what Clinton audaciously did, here is the best definition of a Sister Souljah Moment I have as yet come upon--

It is a critical moment in a campaign when a candidate takes what appears to be a bold stand against certain extremes in his or her own party and offers a calculated denunciation of that extreme position or special interest group. 

Such an act of repudiation is designed to signal to centrist voters that the politician is not beholden to traditional, and sometimes unpopular, interest groups associated with the party, although such a repudiation runs the risk of alienating some of the politician's allies and the party's base voters.

In 1992 popular African-American hip hop artist and social activist, Sister Souljah, provided Clinton with the opportunity to criticize her extreme views about race relations and thereby demonstrate he was not beholden to any special interest groups.

In a Washington Post interview Sister Souljah was quoted as saying (in response to a question regarding black-on-white violence during the 1992 Los Angeles riots):

Question: Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think that was wise? Was that a wise reasoned action?

Souljah: Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?... White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, are above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own kind?

Speaking to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition in June 1992, Clinton responded both to that quotation and to something Souljah had said in the music video of her song "The Final Solution: Slavery's Back in Effect" ("If there are any good white people, I haven't met them").

Clinton said: "If you took the words 'white' and 'black,' and you reversed them, you might think the KKK's David Duke was giving that speech." 

This elicited a storm of hot debate but most dispassionate observers concluded that Clinton won the political battle and that helped him do better than expected, like it or not, among disaffiliated white voters.

I said "like it or not" because I do not like any of this. But politics is an ugly business and if Biden roughing up Booker will help him defeat Trump I will find a way until the day after Election Day 2020 to live with it.

August 24, 2015--Hillary's Sort of Sister Souljah Moment

After they disrupted her town hall meeting in Keene, NH, earlier this month, Hillary Clinton agreed to meet privately with representatives of Black Lives Matter, the activist organization that emerged in 2012 in response to Trayvon Martin being shot to death by George Zimmerman.

It has gained additional public attention more recently as the result of a series of killings of young black men by white policemen. Black activist members of BLM have been active on the presidential campaign trial, disrupting meetings of candidates of both parties, though mainly Democrats.

The private meeting occurred August 11th and a tape of it was released last week. It showed a very different picture of Hillary Clinton than the one seen on the campaign trail.

Rather than the cautious, heavily scripted, disciplined, insulated Hillary, who would rarely deviate from her notes and talking points or plunge into the crowd, it showed, in the words of the New York Times report, a "spontaneous, impassioned" Hillary, seemingly "unconcerned about potential repercussions."

Considering how essential the black vote is to her candidacy, she gave as good as she got in her encounter. If the media could for one moment have stopped the obsession with Donald TRUMP (which I confess to share) it could have been her Sister Souljah Moment.

That Moment occurred back in 1992 during the presidential campaign when Bill Clinton embraced and even bigger risk when he took on racist comments by Souljah, a popular hip-hop artist and black activist.

Among other things she said, "If there are any good white people, I haven't met them."

Clinton shot back, at great political risk, "If you took the words 'white' and 'black' and you reversed them, you might think [Ku Klux Klanner] David Duke was giving that speech."

Some feel this rare example of courage won the election for Clinton.

At her meeting with the Black Lives Matters group, Hillary Clinton was criticized for her "culpability" in supporting her husband's criminal justice polices that, they claimed, were responsible for the incarceration of disproportionate numbers of black men.

She listened for more than five minutes, nodding as they confronted her for not doing enough to oppose racism and federal polices that contribute ultimately to the killing of innocent black people.

From the heart, she challenged them in return, saying, "You can get lip service from as many white people you can pack into Yankee Stadium and a million more like it who are going to say,'We get it, we get it. We are gong to be nicer.' That's not enough in my book."

Further, she pressed them to move beyond rhetoric to action, citing her own work decades ago with the Children's Defense Fund. Unless young people become directly engaged in efforts that actually make a difference, she told them, if making speeches and demonstration is all that happen, "We'll be back here in 10 years having the same conversation."

That unscripted Hillary could be elected if nominated.