Mrs. Clinton's Plantation
Shelby Steele has an interesting article about Mrs. Clinton in the Opinion Journal. He argues that Mrs. Clinton's recent remark comparing the Congress to a "plantation" at a celebration for Martin Luther King day actually shows how frightened she is of Condi Rice. He argues that Republican's have an advantage so long as Democrats use blacks only for the politics of resentment:

No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is "overcoming" rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, "springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done." And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton's "plantation" pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.

- posted by Base10 @ 10:26 AM