Titans on the Mat
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
Thursday, May 8, 2008
We put too much stock in the Oedipal theory of history, my late polymath friend Jim Chapin, the most generous of mentors to historians and journalists, used to argue. More common than children overthrowing their parents, Chapin said, was parents stamping out their children's revolts. More revolutions fail than succeed. Chapin called this the Cronus theory, after the Titan in Greek mythology who, on hearing that one of his children would overthrow him, swallowed them whole (except, unfortunately for Cronus, Zeus, who, sure enough, overthrew him).
In recent weeks, the specter of Cronus has haunted Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. It has appeared in two forms -- the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and, counting two as one, Hillary and Bill Clinton. On Tuesday, Obama handily dispatched Wright. How exactly he will dispatch the Clintons -- and whether they will persist in transforming themselves into their party's two-headed Cronus -- remains to be seen.
With his appearance at the National Press Club last week, Wright endeavored, whether consciously or not, to swallow both Obama and Obamaism. His onetime parishioner might be telling Americans that it was time to end our historic divisions, and Obama's young followers might be chanting "Race doesn't matter," but Wright would set them all straight. By heightening racial polarization, Wright delivered self-fulfilling prophecies of America's inability to transcend its racism.
On Tuesday, however, those prophecies were not fulfilled. By breaking forcefully with Wright and by refocusing on the economy, Obama came through the worst patch of his campaign to do better among white voters than he had in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- primaries that had preceded Wright's press club outburst. Obama pulled down 40 percent of the white vote in Indiana, an improvement over the 34 percent he won in Ohio and the 37 percent he won in Pennsylvania. He also won 37 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, which, notwithstanding the in-migration of Northern whites to the Research Triangle, is still a Southern state.
(Continued here.)
Washington Post
Thursday, May 8, 2008
We put too much stock in the Oedipal theory of history, my late polymath friend Jim Chapin, the most generous of mentors to historians and journalists, used to argue. More common than children overthrowing their parents, Chapin said, was parents stamping out their children's revolts. More revolutions fail than succeed. Chapin called this the Cronus theory, after the Titan in Greek mythology who, on hearing that one of his children would overthrow him, swallowed them whole (except, unfortunately for Cronus, Zeus, who, sure enough, overthrew him).
In recent weeks, the specter of Cronus has haunted Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. It has appeared in two forms -- the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and, counting two as one, Hillary and Bill Clinton. On Tuesday, Obama handily dispatched Wright. How exactly he will dispatch the Clintons -- and whether they will persist in transforming themselves into their party's two-headed Cronus -- remains to be seen.
With his appearance at the National Press Club last week, Wright endeavored, whether consciously or not, to swallow both Obama and Obamaism. His onetime parishioner might be telling Americans that it was time to end our historic divisions, and Obama's young followers might be chanting "Race doesn't matter," but Wright would set them all straight. By heightening racial polarization, Wright delivered self-fulfilling prophecies of America's inability to transcend its racism.
On Tuesday, however, those prophecies were not fulfilled. By breaking forcefully with Wright and by refocusing on the economy, Obama came through the worst patch of his campaign to do better among white voters than he had in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- primaries that had preceded Wright's press club outburst. Obama pulled down 40 percent of the white vote in Indiana, an improvement over the 34 percent he won in Ohio and the 37 percent he won in Pennsylvania. He also won 37 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, which, notwithstanding the in-migration of Northern whites to the Research Triangle, is still a Southern state.
(Continued here.)
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