"Race" to the White House

In the past year, there have been a surge of celebrity attacks on race or gender being reported by the media. There was Don Imus blatantly insulting Rutgers womens' basketball, and let us not forget the incident with Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) flying off the deep end at a comedy club upon the face of mild heckling. These incidents were not only on the front pages of every major and reputable news publication, but video clips found their ways onto YouTube, blogs and personal sites all over the internet.

Most recently, however, was the fiasco with Hillary Clinton allegedly denying Martin Luther King Jr. his status as the pioneer of the 1960s civil rights movement. The exact phrase was, "Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done."

I am certainly not endorsing the notion that King had only a marginal effect on civil rights in the twentieth century, but to me this is clearly not what Clinton had stated. In fact, it was not even what she implied. According to a column in today's Wall Street Journal:

This idea seems so illogical that the only way to understand it is to approach it as a puzzle. After all, why would a white person running for president in 2008 dismiss the legacy of King near his birthday, which is celebrated as a national holiday, and right before a primary in a state with a large black vote?

To do such a thing would suggest inability to tie one's shoes. Let's imagine that in private Sen. Clinton thought little of King, which is vastly unlikely for someone of her background. Still, the puzzle remains: Why would she, an intelligent person, say it in public?

Yet there she was on "Meet the Press" Sunday, having to defend herself for simply saying that while King laid the groundwork (which she acknowledged), another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson's masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress. She was arguing that she is more experienced in getting laws passed in Washington than is Barack Obama -- which is true.

Clinton's seemingly innocuous comments were at once taken out of proportion by the media, and by Obama himself, who many now accuse of using divisive politics in the midst of the heated primary season. I'm not saying that Clinton shouldn't censor her comments slightly more carefully, especially considering the fact that the media is so sensitive to these sort of remarks and she does want to secure a seat in the White House. However, I am surprised that she has managed to get herself into the exact same situation again. Remember her 2004 joke about another major civil rights hero--Mahatma Gandhi?

One would think that she would have learned her lesson after that media uproar. But as the saying goes, history repeats itself. I just didn't think it would repeat itself with the exact same individual and in the span of a few years.

Again, I'm not claiming to be averse to civil rights issues and I do think that people in the spotlight, not to say the least those who want to become president, should treat the issues of race and gender with the utmost sensitivity. I do not agree with what Imus said or with what Kramer did. However, this is one situation that I'd have to agree with the conservative commentators on.