Bill Clinton's Selfish Myopia

It pains me greatly to write this post because--despite his many faults--I have long been an admirer of Bill Clinton. He's a man with enormous political talents, and I think he has used those talents over the years to advance progressive notions of justice and equality in a significant way. And I think his commitment to these ideals is genuine and deeply held.

Which is why it is so disillusioning to see him engaged in what is obviously an attempt to marginalize his wife's chief rival as "the black candidate." Just today, he was trying to spin away Obama's overwhelming victory in South Carolina by going out of his way to compare Obama to Jesse Jackson. There has clearly been an attempt by the Clinton campaign over the last week or so, led chiefly by Bill Clinton, to dismiss Obama's success in South Carolina as being all about race. The goal has been to transport us back in time 20 years, to turn what had begun as an almost post-racial election into a replay of 1988. As Clinton knows, if Americans come to see Obama as the candidate of African-Americans--like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in prior presidential races--his support among whites, hispanics, and other ethnic groups will plummet.

If this strategy is successful, it will all but ensure that Hillary Clinton wins the nomination. In that sense, it's smart and crafty politics. But it will only accomplish this at the expense of progressive ideals and the well-being of the country generally. It will take a moment in history that could have marked a huge step forward for the country and turn it into a huge step backward. It will take a moment that could have gone a long way toward smoothing over long-simmering racial tensions and instead only further inflame them.

Clinton is sullying his reputation, harming the Democratic coalition, and setting back race relations in this country, and he's doing all of this solely to advance his wife's near-term political prospects. It's as if he's become so focused on winning this primary battle that he's completely lost sight of all larger considerations.

In this sense, Bill Clinton reminds me of Colonel Nicholson, Alec Guinness's memorable character in The Bridge On the River Kwai. Nicholson, a British POW in a Japanese camp in Burma during World War II, becomes so obsessed with his appointed task of building a bridge over the Kwai River that he completely loses sight of whose side he's on and what he's spent his life fighting for. When a team of British soldiers is sent to blow up the bridge, he actually tries to thwart their efforts, coming to his senses only in the final scene of the movie where he exclaims, with his last breath, "What have I done?"

I sincerely hope that Obama is able to overcome the Clintons' cynical and destructive attempts to marginalize his impressive victory today and make this a campaign about race. If he's not, Bill Clinton may one day have to grapple with the reality that he personally set back a lot of the goals he'd spent his life fighting for, all in a myopic attempt to get his wife elected president.