This was in reply to a (thoughtful and sincere) thread by another DUer who questioned the scale of the response generated by Clinton's comments today. I decided to put it in its own thread (with some additional remarks) because it touches on some deeper issues that have taken me some time to articulate to myself, let alone DU.
As a little context to those remarks, I'd like to remind people (if they ever knew) that I'm Irish. When I was 18 I moved to London and lived there for a number of years. At that time, the IRA was actively engaged in terrorism on the British mainland, and I was often the butt of good-natured but half-nervous jokes - work colleagues would ask me if I had a bomb in my briefcase and suchlike. Bomb threats or occasional attacks that led to the shutdown of the London subway system were a regular occurrence. I've been on the scene of a terorist bomb explosion, where I escaped injury or death by the merest random chance (luckily, nody was killed by that one). And while I lived in the UK, two separate attempts were made on the lives of two British prime ministers.
All these were cases of terrorism rather than assassination, but the dividing line between the two is never that well-defined. I mention all this not to suggest that I know more about violence as an element of political culture, but that I might have a somewhat different perspective on it from some of you.
I. Violence in political culture.
I certainly don't think she sits around with Bill in the evenings and says 'I sure hope someone does you-know-what'. To me her remarks today (which was not spontaneous - she's made it before, been criticized here, but the annoyance was short-lived) indicate something else.
That Obama faces an additional threat because of his race is not news. When he first announced, it was alluded to by a variety of people I know, long before the media made mention of it. It has cropped up periodically in the media. It is, bluntly, something that I and a lot of Obama supporters worry about in the backs of our minds; of course he is well-protected, but there are a lot of irrational people and guns to go around in the world.
What bothered me about Clinton's statement was twofold. First, it reactivates such worries, and the effect (if not the intention) is to remind us of the possibility that his progress (and by extention, ours) can be interrupted. I imagine that if Obama referred to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan last December, a number of people who support Hillary would take umbrage, to put it mildly.
Secondly, I feel that while violence can touch all our lives, those in the public eye are paradoxically both more insulated from it and more threatened by it. To bring it up in a discussion of electoral strategy was not just tacky, but grants violence a role in political calculations which it does not deserve. It is for this reason that Bhutto's name will live on as an example of great political courage; in that case the threat was distinct, imminent and not even the first attempt. To cite assassination as a campaign consideration - rather than in the context of policy - deeply debases our political culture.
II. Where rationality fails
Ask yourself seriously - do you think that Obama's secret service guard will more on edge as a result of this comment, or less? I am not suggesting that they would become complacent, they are highly trained and know their job far better than any of us as observers. The sad fact is that there are people out there whose response to such comments may not be rational or predictable. There's a woman in New Mexico who filed for a restraining order against David Letterman (and astonishingly, got one) because she says he has been sending her coded messages through her TV for 10 years. John Hinckley attacked President Reagan because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster.
In the context of the current election, you don't have to look far to find people breathlessly talking about things like class war, race war, the antichrist, sleeper agents, manchurian candidates and all that sort of stuff. But, you say, those people are crazies, they just sit there spouting their crazy shit on the internet all day. So what, you say.
Well, before the internet was a big deal, back in 1987, there were other diversions. Remember 'Dungeons and Dragons'? A popular pursuit for a certain sort of nerd. I enjoyed it, a lot; enough that I used to play by mail - one way of taking part in a game with a large number of participants over a longer time frame. I played a variety of strategy and roleplaying games by mail,
There were monthly newsletters, printed up on Xerox machines. And in those newsletters people would send messages to each other, calling out smack talk and so on - much as they do in online multi-player games today. Sometimes the smack talk got really out there, but it was all good clean fun. Or so I thought until one of the people I 'knew' through one of these role-playing communities went over the edge one day and shot 15 people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacreIrrational people present a danger to society precisely because their psyches are not well grounded. Zealotry exploits a similar dynamic. Overall this risk is very small and our safeguards generally effective. But as with controversial remarks in many other political contexts, public statements about assassination do not take place in a vacuum. Discussing that issue in the same breath as a sitting president, for example, would not only be tasteless but possibly foolhardy. The mere fact that the current incumbent is so unpopular means that what one person may see as an offhand remark would be interpreted by another as threatening or endorsing violence.
III.
After all the controversies and -gates of the long political campaign, nerves on both sides are frayed and sensitivities are abnormally high. Clinton supporters have gone ballistic at least as often as Obama supporters over remarks which they find terribly offensive. To publicly mention assassination while talking about the month of June (a mere week away, folks) and how it might affect a political campaign is to display a political insensitivity that is nothing short of breathtaking. This was not some academic or abstract discussion of political history. This was one candidate in a bitterly fought race alluding to the fact that another historic candidacy was ended in the next month on the calendar.
We can disagree and debate endlessly on the motivations behind such a remark, but its significance is not a matter of debate. Hillary Clinton's remark was the political equivalent of lighting a cigarette in a gas refinery: you just can't do that.
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