Fracture (Joy Reid): Obama, the Clintons, and Racial Divide
How do the Clintons get a pass on this shit?! How do they get away with saying they've always been working hard for blacks?! Looking at you, South Carolina!
JOY-ANN REID: It’s interesting, because in 2008, in that campaign, you really did see both of the Clintons litigating with then-Senator Obama the legacy of the civil rights era. And they ran into trouble over their interpretation of the dichotomy between the Kingian nonviolent movement for social change, for economic empowerment, but also for the right to vote, and the Lyndon Johnson real break with his own party and with the once-Democratic, solid, segregated South on the issue of civil rights. And they ran into trouble, but the fundamental question that the Democratic Party has faced over the last 50 years is what to do with Johnson’s legacy, whether to run away from it, which the party by and large did, really spearheaded by Bill Clinton, who shifted the party to the right as a corrective to what I think a lot of party leaders saw as the consequences, the electoral consequences, of embracing so much social change.
JOY-ANN REID: It was interesting, because once Jesse Jackson had achieved these two back-to-back campaigns, that really were successful political movements that galvanized African Americans, the party had to decide what to do with him. And by 1988, really, the answer was, you know, we’re going to set him aside. And Bill Clinton really led that in 1992, when he essentially rebuked Jesse Jackson, and he was also at the same time, people will recall, rebuking Mario Cuomo and the liberal, McGovernite wing of the party. And he did so in very stark terms, as a way of signalizing to really white working-class voters that this is a party that’s not beholden to the Jackson wing, this is a candidacy that’s not beholden to Jackson himself. And that rejection of Jackson in 1992 really reset the party with white working-class voters, helped Bill Clinton to win the White House. But it set a tone for the party that was very center-right and that had liberals within the party really left yearning for a movement of their own. And it took quite a long time for the liberal wing to come back and for the African-American sort of part of that movement to find its own voice. But they definitely did in 2008.
JOY-ANN REID: Yeah, it’s interesting, because Hillary Clinton has had this remarkable arc over the course of her life, from being a sort of conservative, "Goldwater Girl" teenager to being this really fierce, feminist young lawyer in Arkansas and this, you know, advocate or this acolyte of Marian Wright Edelman, to then having to shift back into a traditional first lady role after really being rebuked for trying to have a policy portfolio of her own with healthcare. And so she sort of occupied this strange space that has mirrored the Democratic Party, that’s gone left, she’s gone right, she’s been hawkish, she’s been sort of the neocon in the party. And now she’s trying to find her own individual voice and balance whether she is, in a sense, looked at as a Clinton restoration candidate or an Obama continuation candidate, because she has a role, really, in both of those administrations, in both of those wings of the party. So she has this sort of odd space, and she hasn’t really decided which camp to really come down on. And she really needs to, because she needs that ascendant Obama coalition in order to become president.
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/9/21/fracture__author_joy_ann_reid
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tried to extinguish. Truly "incredible" and "ironic." Now Hillary is running against Bill's admin, too.
