The Jesse Jackson Test

Buried Friday beneath a mountain of reports on “monster” comments and John McCain’s temper, and hidden deep within a story about comments Hillary Clinton made about the state of Mississippi way, way back before the caucuses of Iowa, was this little gem of a quote from the senator:

“You know, a few months ago, I was quoted as saying that Iowa and Mississippi had never elected a woman statewide. Now I know that you’ve had two women lieutenant governors, but electing a woman on your own, I was the first woman elected on my own in New York. And I know one way we can make a statement for Mississippi, and that is for Mississippi to vote for a woman for president on Tuesday!”

Wow. Where is the outrage? This is a major candidate in a campaign for the highest office in this land, shouting from the stump that we should vote for her because she is a woman…and no one calls her on it. Can you imagine the firestorm if John McCain got up there and said something like, “Well, folks, we’ve got some diversity in this race. There’s white and there’s black. There’s male and there’s female. And when Mississippi looks at me, they see white and male. So vote for me, the white guy.” He would be slaughtered for that, and rightfully so.

But Hillary Clinton is not, and such rhetoric has become such a characteristic of her campaign that few even notice anymore. It is insulting to women that Hillary thinks these kinds of tactics will work—and embarrassing to women when they do.
On the same day the Chicago Tribune debunked the myth of her 35 years of experience, Senator Clinton went back to what has been her bread and butter throughout this campaign: the gender card. Why? Because the longer this campaign goes the clearer it becomes that she doesn’t have a whole lot else to fall back on.

In South Carolina, husband Bill Clinton so famously compared Barack Obama to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who won the state both in 1984 and 1988. President Clinton was deservedly lampooned for those comments—but there is a candidate in this race who does deserve the comparison to Jesse Jackson. His wife.

None of Jackson’s presidential runs had any real chance to succeed nationally. He carried blacks with ease but was never going to be able to sell himself to white America. And you could argue that he never really intended to. His reasons for running were his own, and winning may not have been the ultimate goal. He had a niche audience to reach, and he not only succeeded at that but also in introducing himself to an entire new generation of Americans. We can’t call his defeats failures, because the end result was that Jesse Jackson remains a national figure to this very day.

Senator Clinton most definitely did get into this race in order to win it, but she has repeatedly failed what we can call the “Jesse Jackson Test”. It isn’t enough to run to be the first woman, or first black, or first Latino, president. The candidate must transcend that and become just another contender running for the office of President of the United States. Any “first” candidate needs to pass that test to have any real shot at victory in the general election.

This is where Obama has excelled and Clinton has stumbled. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has provided the Obama campaign with more than just the occasional sound byte. Patrick’s successful 2006 campaign to become this state’s first black governor provided a blueprint on how to pass the Jesse Jackson Test.

On the campaign trail, Patrick never brought up the possibility of being the first black governor, and rarely responded to questions about the issue. It would occasionally arise in media reports, more often as a historical footnote than anything else. Patrick constantly stayed on his message. He smartly chose to let the very obvious fact that he was a black man speak for itself as he marched on to victory. In January of 2007, Deval Patrick was inaugurated as Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the steps of the State House in Boston, the same city NBA legend Bill Russell once called “the most racist in America.”

When you hear it said that Barack Obama transcends race, he is doing so in the exact same way as Deval Patrick. Obama is running for President of the United States, not to be the first black anything. He doesn’t try to hammer into his audience the idea that a vote for him may very well also be a vote for history. That message sells itself.

Senator Clinton, meanwhile, flatly refuses to transcend gender. It is an unfortunate truth that in the America of the early 21st century, there are voters out there unwilling to vote either for a black man or a white woman, and that, deep down, there only rationale is racism or sexism. And it is also just as unfortunate that there are large blocs of voters who will vote for an African American or a woman simply to do just that. I would argue that any voter who does that is also guilty of racism or sexism, and while no candidate would or should ever be expected to turn down such votes, we have only one candidate in this race who is openly advocating for them.

It is with regularity now that Senator Clinton reminds audiences that even a vote for her opponent would be historic. And while that may seem like a classy and selfless sentiment when taken at face value, nothing in modern politics can be interpreted that way. This is the candidate’s way of reminding voters that Obama is black—necessary, from her point of view, because his passing of the Jesse Jackson Test has made her own failure that much more damaging. Obama refuses to remind voters that he is black, and it makes Clinton look even worse every time she reminds us that she is a woman.

Don’t let her get away with it. Mississippi should send a message on Tuesday, as Wyoming has this weekend and Pennsylvania should on April 22nd. Hillary Rodham Clinton does not deserve your vote, this nomination, or a spot on the ticket in 2008.

(Original Post Date: 3/9/2008)