Martin LeFevre: No Transformation in Hillaryland

Senator Barack Obama said recently that his presidency would unleash a "transformation" in America. "The day I'm inaugurated, the country looks at itself differently. And don't underestimate that power. Don't underestimate that transformation," Obama told the crowd at the National Urban League convention in St. Louis, Missouri.

But if Barack’s recent tussles with Hillary over the defining issue since 9/11--the masculine use of our military might--is any indication, he’s going to stay stuck in distant second place. The Obama campaign needs to transform its own philosophy and strategy before it can be an expression of and catalyst for a new zeitgeist in the USA.

Obama faces the enormous challenge of defining a new political calculus while the old arithmetic is still seen as valid. Until the basic equation changes, the country will continue to crunch the same dreary numbers, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton will be the sum of all tears.

Of course the deck can, and at some point will, be reshuffled, just as when 9/11 Œchanged the world,’ while transforming nothing. So what kind of Œtransformation’ is Obama talking about?

The question isn’t what the candidate means, since he probably doesn’t know the depth and extent of the radical change required in this country, and certainly couldn’t say if he did.

Politics, it is often said, is the art of the possible. But what does ‘the audacity of hope’ mean after eight years of gutting by Bush-Cheney, when all that remains of the American polity is its shell?

The contradictions of the Obama campaign are exemplified in South Carolina, where the Civil War started and racism is still seated at the head of the table. I lived in Orangeburg, South Carolina for a short time in the early Œ90’s, the site of the first Democratic debate, as well as the virtually unknown ‘Orangeburg Massacre.’

State Troopers shot thirty African American students, killing three, near the campus of South Carolina State in the late Œ60’s in a protest over segregation at a popular establishment in town. That’s the 1960’s, not 1860’s. The ‘unfortunate incident’ (in the words of the governor at the time) happened a couple years before the infamous Kent State Massacre, in which National Guardsmen killed four white kids at a college in Ohio for protesting the Vietnam War. When I lived in South Carolina in 1993, the Confederate Flag still flew over the State Capitol.

As I was moving in and unloading the truck, a good old boy from across the street came out to meet me. When I didn’t bow to his racist baiting, he said, ‘There are Yankees, and there are damn Yankees. Yankees come down here to visit, and damn Yankees come down here to live.’

I asked him if he recalled the Orangeburg Massacre. ‘I was there,’ he replied with pride, ‘standing next to a state cop, who pointed at a big nigger, and said he was going to put a bullet in his head. Then he did.’

That is the living history of the South, and the reason that South Carolina’s Democratic State Senator Robert Ford, who’s black, said recently that if Obama got the nomination, "every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose ‹ because he's black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything."

It’s also the reason that Hillary leads in the polls amongst blacks, especially black women, in South Carolina. As a county Democratic Party chairman said, black people ‘just can't believe in their right mind that white folks will elect a black man president, so let's not put ourselves through that agony."

The real subtext of this campaign isn’t race however; it’s gender. As the Washington Post reported recently, ‘Never have so many women operated at such a high level in one campaign, working with a discipline and a loyalty and a legendary secrecy rarely seen at this level of American politics.’ Rarely seen? What the hell have the last seven years been?

Given Hillary’s penchant for loyalty and secrecy, Obama is right; the Hillbill machine is ‘Bush lite.’ And if Obama keeps trying to prove his cojones in the male-dominated terminology of American politics, Hillary will continue to bust his balls.

There may be enough feminized men and masculinized women in America to get Hillary the Democratic nomination, but if the Republicans get their act together and put forth an Œattractive’ man, are there enough to make her president? What a Hobson’s choice. God help us.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

© Scoop Media