Identity Traps Mire HRC & Obama

David Brooks has an unusually perceptive piece in today's NYT Op-Ed demonstrating the uncharted waters both candidates are treading:

The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

In the immortal words of Pogo, we have met the enemy and they are us.

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Isn't it interesting that the collision between two of the 'Revolution of 1968' mantra movements are now nearing head-on kill-or-be-killed momentum?

Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

Brooks is having none of it. Clinton has turned BS into a high art-form:

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits. Obama’s campaign drew up a memo delineating all of the Clintons’ supposed racial outrages. Bill Clinton is frantically touring black radio stations to repair any wounds.

Meanwhile, Clinton friend Robert Johnson, a one-man gaffe machine, reminds us of Obama’s drug use and accuses him of being like Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Another Clinton supporter, Gloria Steinem, notes that black men were given the vote a half-century before women.

When living fossils like loathesome childless crone Steinem & the imbecilic Johnson & the robo-Barry White sex-machine Rangel get behind Hillary, you know she is too OLD & her time is TOO FAR BEHIND to really register with the up-and-coming youth who want hope and change rather than policy-wonk partisanship. Brooks has a great finale:

This is the logical extreme of the identity politics that as been floating around this country for decades. Every revolution devours its offspring, and it seems the multicultural one does, too.

The final two points I’d make are: First, this whole show seems stale and deranged to the younger set, as Obama and Clinton seemed to recognize when they damped down the feud yesterday afternoon. The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

At last, a bridge to the 21st century.

The winner of this civil war might be Bill Richardson for VP?