"The new black"

Tina Fey's awesome segment this week on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" probably understands what people like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich (especially today's column) can't in all their Clinton-bashing: that Democrats want to rally around an issue, a cause, a hope of some sort, and that Clinton--unless one declares "Bitch is the new black"--just seems to ignore this want or need. She differentiates herself, that is, in precisely the wrong way from Obama: in making her campaign about experience and practicality rather than a cause or several causes, she is seen as being indifferent to the spirit of hope in ideas that the Democrats currently have. More precisely, she gives Democrats the feeling that she thinks all Democratic issues are alike in the sense that they are implementable in a policy. Democrats now want to assert--against years and years of Republican distortions--that they have intrinsic good. It is indeed the worst case of wanting to feel self-righteous: they want to feel as self-righteous as Republicans. This doesn't mean they are voting for Obama out of guilt or anything: it is just that a call for unity around an issue is seen as courageous because it assuages doubts about the rightness of the idea in the first place.  Thus the inane calls for Clinton to try and "transcend gender" as much as Obama is "transcending race"--as if this were possible or even is being done by Obama. What this statement really means is that Clinton should give us hope of making gender something that should be transcended again as much as Obama is with race. Thus Fey's comment: Clinton has to say that she stands for something larger than herself about which she can always be impractical or believe in more radically than any policy's ability to implement an openness to it. Fey is reminding us, and her, that this "something" is her gender.

In other words, Democrats want to unify around all those ideas left behind with the takeover of Reagan, not in their practical aspect at all, but precisely around the utter impracticality of what they stand for. They want to restore some force to these ideas. Obama indeed believes these ideas have force. Clinton says they are words that need to be implemented. This is the difference and the difference is crucial. Democrats don't want to doubt the correctness of their ideas anymore: they look enviously over at the self-righteousness of the Republicans.

The issue isn't whether Clinton is more right about the nature of the ideas than Obama: Obama is in fact just as practical as Clinton in most respects when it indeed comes to implementing these ideas. The issue is the dangerous direction that this means the Democratic party could be headed on: the same route as the Republicans in the 80's and 90's. Democrats are tired of being the reality-check to the Republican party. And rather than confronting the problems that the ideas of the 60's and 70's have turned into--notably, the issue of identity--they want to restore the sense of the goodness or correctness of them. Clinton sees them as problems in the sense that they have to be implemented. Obama sees them as opportunities precisely in the same sense. The latter is what the Democrats want, regardless of whether the particular constitution of the ideas ideas themselves are practical or impractical in their conception to begin with.

That said, this is only an argument against the prevailing tendency of Rich and Dowd in their commentaries to belittle Clinton via contesting her pragmatism when they are really contesting her lack of their optimism about issues like gender and race. Thus, it is also against the dangerous language of fashion that Fey employs mistakenly to give body to the optimism that she really, beneath the word "new," is wonderfully standing for. In short, it is dangerous not in how Fey uses it (the point is actually that bitch was always the same as black), but in how it might be heard. That is, it is dangerous in how it is actually a reflection of the sad reality of what would appeal to the Left: they want to be able to have ideas be able have such inherent force and rightness again that they can be turned into a fashion even (see the current status of the environmental movement in its green living, etc.).

Of course there are many more reasons to vote for Obama than just this sense of his optimism in ideas, and this is reflected at the polls or at least in people's sentiments.  And there are many more reasons to vote against or for Clinton than her stance on the belief of these issues. The point is that Clinton isn't helping herself by saying comments like this in Providence, Rhode Island, parodying Obama:

“Now I could stand up here and say, let’s get everybody together, let’s get unified the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing,” she said, to a smattering of giggles. “And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect... But I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and make the special interests disappear.”

-"Clinton Turns from Anger to Sarcasm," from the New York Times

This is actually quite disgusting. The hardening of Hillary Clinton in this hour in her campaign against the hope in Obama's will only bring her message out less: it's utter inanity on her part. It makes the issues of the Left, which they are right in caring about (though perhaps not in the way they think about them), seem like a joke when they exceed the realm of policy and become beliefs, when, to these people, they are absolutely not.