Essay 351

The following appeared in The Chicago Tribune…

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Plantation politics revisited, again
A metaphor that keeps reappearing

By Clarence Page

January 22, 2006

WASHINGTON -- If you’re a sensitive sort, put in your earplugs. The brutal ugliness of presidential campaign politics has already begun, judging by the manufactured indignation of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s critics over her “plantation” crack.

In case you have not heard, the New York Democrat and, lest we forget, former first lady, rallied a mostly black crowd in a Harlem church on Martin Luther King Jr. Day by saying the House of Representatives “has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about.”

For this, Hillary has been getting hammered with brickbats by voices on the right (“I think it’s ridiculous—it’s a ridiculous comment,” said First Lady Laura Bush) and even a few tut-tuts from the left (“What it tells us is not about race, but about Hillary’s tin ear and her lack of awareness of it,” writes neo-blogger Arianna Huffington.)

I, for one, wonder, “What’s the big deal?” “Plantation politics” is an old metaphor in black community politics. A Dec. 13, 1987, Chicago Tribune article traced the phrase to a speech that political consultant Don Rose wrote in 1966 for then-Ald. Timuel Black’s crusade against the Democratic machine of Mayor Richard J. Daley. It later became a rallying cry in Harold Washington’s successful 1983 campaign to become the city’s first black elected mayor.

Whether a young Hillary Rodham, who grew up in Park Ridge, picked up the metaphor there, I do not know. But, there’s no denying the fact that the word has a special power among African-Americans. According to Robert Franklin, a theology professor at Emory University, the word is “shorthand for an immoral concentration of resources, exclusion and the arrogance of a company’s unchecked power.”

Or a legislature’s unchecked power. After all, Newt Gingrich made the same comparison in 1994, just before he became speaker of the House: “Since they think it is their job to run the plantation,” he said of the Democrats who controlled the House, “it shocks them that I’m actually willing to lead the slave rebellion.”

My conservative blog-writing friend Robert A. George, a former Gingrich aide who describes himself as a “Catholic, West Indian black Republican,” defends his former boss, saying the “context” was different. “He was not speaking to a black audience,” George writes, “or even obliquely referring to one; there was not an implicit racial connotation to his words.” Oh? So, it’s OK to talk about plantations as long as it is not to a black audience?

Significantly, the backlash against Clinton’s plantation talk comes at a time when quite a few conservatives have appropriated the word, particularly to attack blacks who stay on the “liberal plantation.”

To his credit, my friend Robert wants both sides to drop the plantation talk. You don’t win new friends by calling them plantation slaves, he points out. True enough. Besides, anyone running for president should know that the sensibilities of moderate swing voters nationwide are not as battle-hardened as those in Chicago, the city that coined the phrase “politics ain’t beanbag” and associates St. Valentine’s Day with a massacre.

Or maybe there’s something else at work here. Maybe it is not what Sen. Clinton said that mattered as much as who said it.

She might have hyped up her hyperbole a bit, but anybody who says she’s wrong hasn’t been paying much attention to Congress in recent years.

Take the night of Dec. 21, for example, when Vice President Dick Cheney flew halfway around the world to cast the deciding vote on a budget that took health care and nursing-home care away from as many as 100,000 people with income below the poverty line. It also saddled low-income college kids with extra debt. And it took away $5 billion to help states track down deadbeat dads and collect child-support payments. Estimated loss in child support to kids: $8 billion.

These cuts and more were made in order to regain some of the deficit caused by tax cuts for those of us who are fortunate enough to be in the upper-income brackets. Thanks, Congress. Meanwhile, Democrats could do little but sit on the sidelines and complain about how little review or open debate the mammoth bill received before its late-night rush to passage.

Newt Gingrich had it right. Plantation masters should not be surprised to see a rebellion. Maybe we’ll see one in this year’s elections.

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