“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” — Pat Buchanan.
I’m of two minds on the New York Times magazine’s article on what Barack Obama’s possible presidency may mean to traditional black political establishment. The CBC and its ilk should have their collective feet held to the flame, and not because so many of their members hedged on Obama and supported Clinton. It’s because of stuff like supporting Bill Jefferson, Ed Towns taking bushels of dough from tobacco companies along with Charlie Rangel, who devotes his free time to probably-legal-but-fishy-smelling self-aggrandizement projects. There are legitimate civil rights heroes among their number, of course, and not everyone nurtued by the “old-school black political paradigm” is Sharpe James or Kwame Kilpatrick. (And I personally just feel that, in the main, they’re insufficiently progressive.) But their way of doing business — no Negro shall seek office without our imprimatur! — stifles the plurality of voices in black political discourse and serves mostly to perpetuate their influence and careers.
But the wariness about Obama? That’s totally understandable. “If anybody tells you they expected this result, they’re not being honest with you,” James Clyburn said in the Times piece. He ain’t lyin’. Obvious well-earned racial neuroses aside, these black politicos were being asked to sign on with a dude whose revolutionary campaign model was cribbed in no small measure from Howard Dean, from cultivating the Netroots to the 50-state strategy — ideas with which few people were sold on even two years ago. Rahm Emmanuel and Chuck Schumer, who helmed the party’s House and Senate campaign committees back in ’06, wanted Dean’s head for trying to put some deeply red states in play somewhere down the line.
When they heard the stories of how Dean was actually spending the party’s cash, however, it was almost more than they could take. Dean was paying for four organizers in Mississippi, where there wasn’t a single close House race, but he had sent only three new hires to Pennsylvania, which had a governor’s race, a Senate campaign and four competitive House races. Emanuel said he was all for expanding the party’s reach into rural states — roughly half the House seats he was targeting were in states like Texas, Indiana and Kentucky, after all — but he wanted the D.N.C. to focus on individual districts that Democrats could actually win, as opposed to just spreading money around aimlessly. The D.N.C. was spending its money not only in Alaska and Hawaii, but in the U.S. Virgin Islands as well. Democratic insiders began to rail against this wacky and expensive 50-state plan. “He says it’s a long-term strategy,” Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said during an appearance on CNN in May. “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” …
In separate conversations, Reid and Pelosi each asked Dean — Reid in his quiet way, Pelosi more stridently — to send some money to the two campaign committees. Dean rebuffed them too. But he did promise that the D.N.C. would help with get-out-the vote campaigns. Emanuel and Schumer then began pressing Dean for a specific field plan — that is, a blueprint for how the D.N.C. would spend money on mobilizing voters, and where. The argument finally exploded during a meeting in May among Dean, Emanuel and Schumer in Dean’s third-floor office at the D.N.C. Emanuel told Dean that the 50-state strategy was a waste of money; Dean shot back that winning elections wasn’t only about TV ads. Emanuel wanted to know what Dean was doing to help in California’s 50th district, where voters were about to hold a special election. When Dean said he had organizers on the ground, Emanuel erupted. “Who?” he demanded. “Tell me their names!” Emanuel, who had a vote at the Capitol, stormed out of the meeting, cursing as he walked down the hall.
Obama obviously dramatically improved on Dean’s foundation, but we only know how smart a gambit that was in retrospect. As good and on-message as Obama’s campaign been, Clinton was that disorganized. No one expected that, either. Clyburn, John Lewis, and all those other vacillators/fence-sitters should probably be cut a little slack.
