Nostalgia will rot your teef

This election cycle has captured my imagination more than any election cycle since I was old enough to have a political consciousness. The current presidential race wells up complicated feelings for me about American politics, class, feminism and race. The Democratic party, in particular is really bringing it in terms of the stakes–the frontrunners–a woman and a black man. But not just any woman, and for me, certainly not the right woman: Hillary Clinton. And not just any black man, certainly not the demagogues of yore like Al Sharpton, but: Barack Obama. Obama, who no one could have seen coming eight years ago, as we were entering the dark night of the American soul that has been the Bush Administration. After Bush stole the election, it seemed like America had been cleaved into two starkly different ideological halves that could never be reconciled; it seemed like a Democrat could never win, even in a fair fight, much less a black or female candidate. And now it seems that there is a palpable chance that that our next president could be a woman or black man. Interestingly, for a brief moment during the gestation of this campaign season, it seemed as if this race was not going to be about identity politics. A ninety-eight percent white Iowan electorate had caucused for Obama, and by quite a large margin too. Of course, the pendulum swung back. Hillary narrowly took New Hampshire and identity politics finally came into play, in a race that had once seemed to include non-traditional candidates for their qualifications and abilities rather than for their identities. In New Hampshire, older white women and the working-class voted for Hillary (a base that Bill Clinton's campaign had appealed to in '92 and '96) yet voters told exit pollsters that they had voted for Obama. Many critics have suggested that there are racial undertones to why people told pollsters one thing and actually voted differently in private. I largely agree with this analysis. At a caucus, people are held accountable for their votes because caucuses are public events, while in a primary in the privacy of the voting booth, people's deep-seated beliefs about race get to come out, without people having to look like racists.

And why is Hillary not the right woman? My disdain for the Clintons is multi-faceted but one of the most difficult things for me to swallow about Hillary Clinton's campaign (next to her use of gender and feminism, which is the subject of another post) is the selling of this myth that the 90's were a magical time. The first election I can really remember clearly was Bill Clinton's first run. Me and every other fourth grade classmate watched Bill Clinton play the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. In the months before the election, kids on the school bus would pound the seats and scream out the windows of the school bus "CLINTON/GORE." And later, I remember the scorn that Dole's limp, pen-clutching hand inspired in my fellow pre-teens during Clinton's incumbent race (although by then, his luster had faded considerably). I am also old/young enough to remember how the Clinton Whitehouse was not kind to the poor. Ironically, not too long after Bill's charisma, which had mobilized the young, the black, and the working-class to put him in the White House, Clinton cut welfare for thousands. America's "first black president" attacked the looming spectre of the black welfare queen by cutting thousands of families off the welfare roles. My family, my immigrant single mother and I, were affected by this legislation.

During the early to mid-nineties, my mother received welfare and Medicaid benefits for me because of my father's refusal/inability to pay child support. When these benefits were cut, my mother and I were left with no financial or medical recourses. We had no money, despite the fact that my mother worked a back-breaking 50-hour a week job as a nanny. From the time I was eleven to the time I was twenty-two (when my graduate school fellowship included health insurance), I simply could not afford to go to the doctor and have lasting, chronic health problems as a result. Though I still remember the early-90's Clintonian enthusiasm quite palpably, I have no desire to take part in the Clinton nostalgia that Hillary's campaign, whose message seems to be that voting for her promises a return to the safe, cuddly, prosperous mid-nineties. There is a scene in Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend where Herzog is giving a guided tour of the tenement building now turned luxury townhouse where both Klaus Kinski and Herzog grew up in post-war Germany. He tells the current owner of the townhouse, "We were not a part of the German economic miracle." This statement accurately describes how I feel about that Clintonian decade. My mother and I did not get to partake of the economic miracle. As we slide into a newly-minted recession, there is finally some talk of public assistance for the victims of unethical sub-prime lenders (though it's still too little too late), finally hints of compassion glint in the public discourse, but during prosperous times the rhetoric always turns back: what are the poor doing to help themselves? Why do they live hand to mouth? Why can't they just put some money aside in the bank?