1968: Assassinations, Chaos, and Bitterness

There's a lot of outrage concerning Hillary Clinton's comments where she brings up the specter of assassination. The New York Times, New York Post, and New York Daily News ran with it as their top story in this morning's papers. Not to be outdone, the Drudge Report is running it as a huge banner with links to several articles about it.

Political commentators are incensed. My very favorite commentator, Keith Olbermann, reserved a rare Special Comment on his MSNBC show, "Countdown" to address Senator Clinton's comments.

Those words, Senator?
You actually invoked the nightmare of political assassination.
You actually invoked the specter of an inspirational leader, at the seeming moment of triumph, for himself and a battered nation yearning to breathe free, silenced forever.
You actually used the word "assassination" in the middle of a campaign with a loud undertone of racial hatred -- and gender hatred -- and political hatred.
You actually used the word "assassination" in a time when there is a fear, unspoken but vivid and terrible, that our again-troubled land and fractured political landscape might target a black man running for president.
Or a white man.
Or a white woman!
You actually used those words, in this America, Senator while running against an African-American against whom the death threats started the moment he declared his campaign?
You actually used those words, in this America, Senator, while running to break your "greatest glass ceiling" and claiming there are people who would do anything to stop you?
You!
Senator -- never mind the implications of using the word "assassination" in any connection to Senator Obama...
What about you?
You cannot say this!

I'm not going to defend Senator Clinton's remarks. They were wrong. She had made these comments several times before, once even before the editorial board of TIME magazine in March. She apologized for them, yesterday.

I've heard some pretty terrible things coming out of the Clinton Camp. Hillary has thrown out some damaging and disparaging remarks at Barack Obama. This is not one of them. This was Senator Clinton honestly rationalizing her never-ending run. As dark and morose as her reasoning may be, her comments are not meant to be hurtful.

There's more below the fold...

Anyone can have his or her remarks twisted, taken out of context, or perverted. While he was heavily criticized—even damned—for his remarks about small-town American voters becoming bitter and clinging to guns and religion, Senator Obama's remarks a few months back made perfect sense to me.

My late father was a Democrat. He was an often unemployed contract laborer. Our family grew up relatively poor in a town near Detroit and he felt let down by our government. But he was a gun owner and a Roman Catholic. As my mother recalls, my father cried only three times during their marriage: when his mother died, when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and when his brother Robert was assassinated in Los Angeles. After RFK's assassination, the riots at the Democratic Convention later that summer, and social unrest, he felt that the country was descending into chaos. The summer before, he broke a man's arm with a pipe trying to flee the infamous Detroit riots.

Beneath a stoic facade, my father often felt threatened, and when he did, he turned to his Bible. And on one hot summer night in 1968, one of those threats became an imminent danger to our family, and he relied on his shotgun to protect us. And when the presidential election came about that November, my father, a good Democrat, voted for the candidate he believed would be the lesser threat to his religion and his perceived Second Amendment rights. My father voted for Richard Nixon.

He always regretted his vote. But had the country, and the especially Democratic Party, not been so sharply divided, his vote may have different. My father was looking for security, and untimely assassinations, a party split over the Vietnam War and civil rights did not offer him much assurance.

We're again at the point now where this party has begun to implode. It is not entirely the fault of Hillary Clinton's Quixotic run. But we're beginning to fight among ourselves. We're at the point where Obama supporters are accusing Clinton of trying to destroy the party and Clinton supporters are threatening to support John McCain (the same mistake my father made 40 years ago).

On both sides, this campaign has been tough and the media has taken great delight in picking apart comments, removing them from context, and creating nuance where there is none. It is egging on a fight. It is providing a soap box for party agitators like Cynthia Ruccia who are threatening protests at this summer's Democratic Convention in Denver. We, as members of the Democratic Party, are being duped by the corporate media into creating the same type of chaos that my father found so distasteful back in 1968.

If we don't learn from our history, I fear that we're destined to repeat it. We must end this bitter family feud before it destroys the family. Hillary's comments were unfortunate, but mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

For the sake of the party and for the country, let's stop the bickering and move on.