Score One for Human Decency

     I've promised one of our faithful readers, who took me to task for the flippancy of the post on voting for Caligula's horse, that I'd write more seriously about the fascinating things occurring this year in the Democratic and Republican parties.  Truth to tell, I'm cheered by Barack Obama's victory over Mrs. Clinton.  So are a lot of people who call themselves conservatives, and that demands some explanation, given that on social issues, on taxes, and on immigration, Mr. Obama's positions are impossible to separate from Mrs. Clinton's.  What is going on here?

     Well, one thing that's going on is that people are feeling the fresh breeze of justice.  The media won't talk about it, but the Lewinsky affair was one of the smaller and less vicious of the scandals of Clintonia.  My own favorite among them all was the acquisition of 900 or so FBI files on leading Republicans, and then the files' disappearance, so that every Republican who was anyone could consider himself compromised, though no one would ever know exactly who, or exactly how.  Machiavelli would have approved.  It may be, it just may be, that Americans have grown weary of the dirty tricks -- the same old pucker-faced manipulators, not sated with eight years in the White House and another eight years in the Senate, weeping on cue, "apologizing" in ways that deny any guilt and continue to cast aspersions on those they have offended, and even descending to the race-baiting we've witnessed in the last week.  And they've gotten the thumping they deserved.

     But the personalities involved fascinate me, too.  Here you have Mrs. Clinton, an economic conservative in her (early) youth, after the fashion of her Republican father: a hard-driving, ambitious, Ivy League woman, working in the wings to bring down that paranoid liberal, Richard Nixon -- a man of immense talents who, outside of the realpolitik of international relations, had no idea what was going on in the culture of his day.  One of the great ironies of our time is that Mrs. Clinton herself bears a great resemblance to Mr. Nixon, I mean in the paranoia, the destructive tendency to mistake political opposition for personal attack.  And she also has not the slightest idea on what precipice her culture stands.  (Eugene McCarthy had that slightest idea, maybe more than that.)  But Mrs. Clinton rode both the old fashioned Powerful Husband train and the newfangled Feminist train to success.  In a way that cripples her maneuverability, she is defined by that conflict, caught in the synergistic ideologies of feminism, statism, and sexual antinomianism.

     But the voters have not flocked to her.  Indeed, she is most fortunate to be alive in the race still, having won New Hampshire by a tiny percentage of the vote, and having sort-of won Nevada by an even tinier percentage.  Over against her stands a man who embodies the single group of people hurt the worst by those synergistic ideologies: black men, who in the fifties could drive the length of North Carolina and not find a decent motel to sleep in, but a third of whom, in the nineties, in the balmy days of Clintonia, found that decent motel at one time or another in places like Leavenworth and San Quentin.  Black men couldn't ride on a lot of buses then.  Nowadays they have been thrown under the bus.  Barack Obama must know this, on some level.  Or it is at least possible that he may come to see it someday, if he is no longer beholden to his party, but his party is beholden to him.  Goodness knows there are plenty of black men around who would be willing to show it to him.  And perhaps, after the recent baiting, he may gather that, after all, the Ivy League lady never has done a darned thing for him and his people; that she and her husband have condescended to them, treating them as mascots; and that, when the days in the White House were over, she did not move back to Arkansas, did not move to live among them, but fled to the whitest of white suburbs of New York.  I don't know.

     I do know that if Mr. Obama is elected president, there is a chance, the slightest of chances, that he may help return the Democratic party to its old and somewhat self-contradictory position as the party of government intervention on behalf of small communities -- and I mean real communities, with all their local and parochial values.  I am not saying that such a position is workable.  But often reform comes with a look backwards, to see what or whom you've forgotten all about.  It used to be that small town Catholics, for instance, voted for the Democrats, and the Democrats, inconsistently to be sure, favored the interests of those small towns, while a Republican secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, would appeal to Darwinian economics, and declaim, for the benefit of the small farmer, "Adapt, or die."  It used to be that Margaret Sanger, peddler of poison for the poor, received splendid welcomes from Republican women's groups -- but that was a long time ago.

     If I were a betting man, I wouldn't lay a hundred dollars on the possibility that Mr. Obama would try to reconnect his party with the localist and populist strain in it, not to mention the unabashed Christian patriotism.  I might bet ten, though.  For one reason only: no one could say him nay.  If he listened to those black ministers, and there are plenty, who point out that the most dangerous locality for a black American is his mother's womb, he would have the moral authority to put the brakes on the Democrat party's rush to approve everything and anything that Americans want to do to children, or to marriage, or to the family.  He could, admittedly from the left, begin to rediscover what a community really looks like.  I'm not saying that he would, or that he probably would.  But as for the woman who wrote that it takes a village to raise a child, and whose whole career has been about nothing other than the co-opting of the village's authority by the leviathan State, and who has spent her life fleeing the village and its healthy parochialisms, she could as soon do it as she could deny what had brought her to her throne.  Mrs. Clinton cannot look to the distant past.  Mr. Obama can.  Whether he would or not, of course, is a different matter.