Hillary Clinton has often been criticized — with plenty of justification — as an overly cautious politician who is imprisoned by her centrist instincts. And the longtime wrap on both Clintons has been that they’re too willing to wink at white grievance, a criticism that dates back to Bill’s infamous “Sister Souljah moment” and to the debate over the 1994 crime bill, during which Hillary notoriously used the term “super-predators.”
All of that has been relitigated during this campaign, thanks in part to challenges from Bernie Sanders and young activists, and Hillary has repudiated much of that history.
But one of the under-appreciated stories of Campaign 2016 has been that in addition to leaving that old politics behind, this time around, Hillary Clinton and her campaign have fully engaged the debates over racism, sexism, and bigotry — with the moral urgency that Trumpism has demanded.
Just watch this new Clinton campaign ad featuring Khizr Khan recounting the story of his son’s death in Iraq, and concluding with this tearful but pointed question: “I want to ask Mr. Trump — would my son have a place in your America?”
The ad is set to run in at least seven battleground states, and CNN reports that this is the Clinton campaign’s thinking about the ad:
The ad is part of Clinton’s closing message, one that her top aides hope will be uplifting and hopeful, offering an implicit contrast to the combativeness that the Trump campaign has turned to in recent weeks.
Unlike in 2012, a campaign that was mostly about tax fairness, the ethics of unbridled capitalism, and the appropriate role and scale of government involvement in our economy, this time around, Trump — and the rise of Trumpism inside the GOP — have forced national debates about racism, sexism, and bigotry towards Muslims and Mexican immigrants to the fore. And it needs to be said that the Clinton campaign has taken them all on frontally — fully engaging the moral argument over each topic.
Clinton may have erred when she said that “half” of Trump’s supporters are “deplorable” due to their Islamophobia, chauvinism, and bigotry, but once she walked back that part of her remarks, the campaign actively sought to force a national argument over Trump’s bigotry and racist campaign. That was also the topic of a big speech about Trump and the alt-right which accused Trump directly of mainstreaming hate. Clinton has also taken on the debates over systemic and environmental racism, and over racial disparities in our criminal justice system. Indeed, this summer, Clinton became the first major party candidate to use the words “systemic racism” in a convention speech, which was a watershed moment, though the Black Lives Matter movement deserves much of the credit for compelling mainstream Democrats to engage those topics seriously.
Clinton also has fully engaged Trump’s Islamophobia in practical and moral terms, arguing not just that such anti-Muslim bigotry threatens to alienate the allies we need in the war on terror, but also that it represents one of many ways that Trump represents a threat to the American experiment. This was typified by the fact that the organizers of the Democratic convention also gave the Khan parents a slot at the convention, which Trump fortuitously rewarded by engaging in bigoted attacks against them that Clinton’s campaign elevated and engaged, culminating in today’s new ad.
Meanwhile, at the debate earlier this week, Clinton stood up for a woman’s right to choose and unleashed scalding criticism of Trump’s belittling of women, saying: “He goes after their dignity, their self-worth. And I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like.” At this moment, Amanda Marcotte argues, Clinton leaned into feminism without apology. And at another key moment at this week’s debate, Clinton sought to dramatize the true human implications of Trump’s xenophobia and vow of mass deportations by declaring it unconscionable to “rip families apart” and even arguing that mass removals would “rip our country apart.” In other words, these millions of people may be undocumented, but they are now contributing to American life.
That’s only a partial list. But it adds up to a remarkable turn of events.
It’s true that all of this may have been made necessary by a special confluence of circumstances. The GOP nominated a man who has openly campaigned on bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny. This, even as Democrats are relying to an ever greater degree on a diversifying coalition that embraces culturally and demographically evolving America, forcing them to more openly confront the politics of white grievance. But in a way all of that is exactly the point. That confluence of circumstances has forced a series of arguments, an airing out of sorts, that hopefully will be beneficial to the country in the long run, even if it doesn’t feel like it right at this moment.