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Hillary Clinton As Jennifer Gratz?

The current Democratic kerfuffle over race and gender may have a wholesome if unintended benefit.

Rasmussen reports that ?among white voters, Clinton leads 41% to 27%. Among African-American voters, Obama leads 66% to 16%.? Clearly, Hillary and her supporters can?t be pleased about these numbers.

Equally clearly, Hillary and her supporters believe that she is better qualified to be president than Obama and that black voters should vote for her because of her qualifications rather than Obama because of his race. She and her supporters believe this notwithstanding the demands of ?diversity,? even though we have never, ever had a ?diverse? president.

If Hillary loses the nomination, or even any primary, and that loss can reasonably be attributed to the defection of black votes in large numbers from her to Obama, she will wake up the next morning standing in Jennifer Gratz?s shoes, and the shoes of every person who believes she has been denied something of value not because of her qualifications but because of her race.

Neither Hillary nor her supporters may recognize that those shoes fit, but that doesn?t mean they don?t.

UPDATE [15 January]

David Brooks makes a similar point in his New York Times column today (along with a world classic typo/misspeak):

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn?t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.
....
All the rhetorical devices that have been a staple of identity politics are now being exploited by the Clinton and Obama campaigns against each other. They are competing to play the victim. They are both accusing each other of insensitivity. They are both deliberately misinterpreting each other?s comments in order to somehow imply that the other is morally retrograde.

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

Obama?s supporters also believe, as I quoted one of them here, that we should ?pick the best president without regard to skin color.?

But why should we take either Hillary or Obama seriously when they, both piously invoking Martin Luther King, ask to be judged as individuals and not as representatives of their race or gender even though they both continue to support affirmative action policies that ?take race and sex into account,? that are ?race and sex sensitive,? that distribute benefits and burdens based on race and sex?

If Hillary and Obama really want to be judged as individuals, why do both of them oppose all state initiatives ? such as the ones that have passed in California, Washington, and Michigan and that will be on the ballots of up to five states next November ? that would require state governments to treat all their citizens as individuals by prohibiting discrimination against or preferential treatment of anyone based on race, sex, or ethnicity? If, in short, Hillary and Obama believe it is just fine for others to be accepted or rejected because of their race or gender, why shouldn?t they be treated the same way?

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 15, 2008 (boomark / email).