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August 27, 2008, 01:34 PM ET
Bill Clinton's Hypotheticals ...
Tonight our former president will formally address his political party’s convention — and only one day after he ostensibly took yet another Hail Mary-sized swing at Obama by invoking some hypothetical “Candidate X” who says all the right things during the campaign but wouldn’t be able to get the job done in office.
Still, everyone anticipates that Bill Clinton will do his partisan part tonight and express his full support for the Obama-Biden ticket. I know political moves can be complicated, but this is getting ridiculous.
When asked about Bill Clinton’s seemingly tepid or conflicted support of Obama, people either invoke the incentive of a potential second run for Hillary in 2012 (if McCain’s the one in office) or Bill’s own wound-licking and hypersensitivity about being characterized as a racist during the primaries. He was, after all, the first black president.
But do we really think that Bill’s still feeling the sting from the ‘racist’ moniker so many months later? Does the label really carry that much power?
Don Imus was nearly tarred and feathered after the Rutgers affair, but he is all the way back in the saddle right now, fully recuperated and re-integrated into the media landscape. Does he hold any hard feelings about the entire thing? Probably. But he hasn’t been banished from the body politic for it? (That was part of my point in invoking him as part of yesterday’s blog.)
And trust me, Michael Richards will be fine, too. As will Jeremiah Wright and Geraldine Ferraro, two more public figures who were dismissed and publicly demonized with the designation “racist” this political season — albeit by very different constituencies.
Let’s stop pretending that being called “racist” (though upsetting) keeps anybody up late at night pulling their hair out and second-guessing themselves. In that specific sense, America probably is post-racial. Few people, black or white, seem to really care about race/racism at all — except as a temporarily powerful rhetorical means to some self-interested and self-indulgent ends.
And for the Don Imus fans who raged against my previous (and relatively innocuous) blog-mention of the cowboy-hatted shock-jock, get Sirius/XM and listen to the real thing already. It is much better radio — and more productively controversial.
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