January 23, 2006
Notes from the plantation...
The junior senator from New York is unsurprisingly chastised from the WSJ Ed Page today. Shelby Steele lets her have it for pandering to a black audience on MLK Day.
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary's remark as follows: "I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes--the wretched of the earth, a slave people--who will surely know all about plantations." Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? 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? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
More surprising is a brief TNR "Notebook" piece:
When the Daily News asked on Tuesday night if she regretted the comment, she said, "Absolutely not. As I have said many times before, Congress is run in a top-down way." The last time we checked, an overly hierarchic corporate management style was not the biggest abomination of slave plantations, but perhaps congressmen have been separated from their families, chained together, forced to work for tobacco farmers, and publicly bought and sold during those mysterious closed-door sessions. And Clinton has been fond of the plantation metaphor for a while now: In a November 2004 interview on CNN, she said, "[T]hey're running the House of Representatives like a fiefdom, with Tom DeLay ... in charge of the plantation." Plantation, fiefdom: We see a rhetorical style developing here. Why doesn't she reach out to Jews, who've sometimes been wary of her, by comparing GOP K Street's intimidation tactics to pogroms in the Pale? And, come to think of it, why haven't any intrepid Democratic candidates seized the opportunity to describe Jack Abramoff's hustling of Indian gaming tribes as a "Trail of Tears"? Oh--because most of them have better taste, that's why.
I would have thought Senator Clinton to be the only/most likely candidate to appeal to the moderate, DLC-wing , New Republic.
This is a smackdown from a friendly corner -- not a good sign.
Ouch, sounds like a very bad case of mixed metaphors to say the least. Attacking Delay's heavy handed tactics has merit but I don't think fiefdom and certainly plantation references are not valid. The best Sen. Clinton can hope for is that people won't judge a book before they have walked a mile in its shoes....
Posted by: Silence Dogood at January 24, 2006 5:04 PMSilence, I am a little disturbed that this woman, whom we all will admit is a Democrat leader, has played the race card in a most callous and heavy handed way. That is more serious than any structural rhetorical problems.
Posted by: jk at January 24, 2006 5:25 PM | What do you think? [2]