article | posted April 27, 2007 (web only)
The Democrats' Depressing Debate
Bob Moser
Maybe it's the fact that I'm sitting in my hotel room, 30 miles up the interstate from Orangeburg, with Johnny Cash on the headphones singing populist murderer's tunes. Or maybe it's because I've been zig-zagging around my native South these last six weeks, taking the political temperature of grassroots Democrats. (In sum, it's 100 degrees and climbing fast, even in the most "Republican" parts of Dixie.) But as I sit here sipping the obligatory late-night bourbon and trying to make sense of what I saw at South Carolina State tonight, what I can't get over has very little to do with what I actually heard and saw. It has everything to do with what the lily-livered, consultant-scripted Democratic Gang of 8--OK, Gang of 6, as Mike Gravel has clearly never met a consultant, bless his heart, and poor dear Dennis has never been able to afford one--could not muster up the guts to say.
There was nary a syllable uttered about race. This is not only shocking at a debate set in a state, and a region--not to mention a country--whose politics and culture and economic caste system, whose everything, has been defined and twisted and perverted by the artificial line between "black" and "white" for its entire history. It's not only shocking in the midst of a war that resembles Vietnam not only in its sensational waste of human life, but in its undeniable quality of being a rich people's war and a poor--and mostly black, and disproportionately Hispanic--people's fight. It's even more shocking because these candidates were standing directly across from the site of one of the most infamous civil-rights atrocities of the late 1960s, the Orangeburg massacre, when South Carolina Highway Patrol officers opened up on black students protesting a segregated bowling alley right here at South Carolina State and shot three of them dead while wounding 27 more. The story was ignored then, though every officer was unjustly acquitted, and now it has been ignored again--even in the wake of another school shooting that did come up in the debate. But this is a part of the country where African Americans fought bravely and staunchly and sometimes violently to make the Civil Rights Act a practical reality. And it's a place where the economic divide that continues to widen is largely--as we saw so vividly in New Orleans, and can just as easily see in Chicago and Los Angeles and New York City--a product of the quieter, subtler, but no less overwhelming white privilege that still prevails not only in South Carolina, but in every crevice and corner of this numb and blind country.
Really, "shocking" is too mild a word. Failing to decry the racial and economic divide, on this historically black campus, in front of folks who can't afford to ignore it, whose history has been written in the very blood of race hate, is downright shameful. The shame extends to all eight candidates. And to all who cheer them on and fail to demand that they not blithely ignore the hideous plank in this nation's collective eye. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/moser 
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