Obama, Bill Clinton Remain Distant

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Obama's Road to the Convention

In the days leading up to his speech at the Democratic National Convention, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama campaigns across the country, stopping in Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Montana.

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But beneath the superficial question of whether Obama talks to Clinton enough, or pays sufficient homage to him, rest deeper issues that go further in explaining their complicated relationship. These have to do with race and the legacy of the 1960s.

Throughout his life, as a son of the New South, Clinton took outsize pride in his attitudes and actions on race. As a young delegate to the Boys Nation convention in Washington in 1963 -- the summer of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, whose 45th anniversary is being celebrated at the Democratic convention this week -- Clinton was one of the few Southern delegates to support a civil rights plank. At Yale Law School, he was the lone white student to sit at what was called the black table. As a young professor at the University of Arkansas, he became a mentor to the first wave of African American law students.

During his rise to the presidency and while in the White House, he seemed preternaturally at ease in black churches, speaking the language of struggle and hope, and he looked to the black community as the foundation of his political support in good times and his salvation when he was in trouble.

So it came as a bitter irony this year that Clinton seemed to lose his footing on issues of race during his wife's presidential primary campaign. The rise of a black candidate discombobulated Bill Clinton, particularly in South Carolina when he was accused of dismissing Obama by likening his victory there to Jesse L. Jackson's in 1984 and 1988. Taylor Branch, a noted historian on racial politics, King biographer and longtime Clinton friend, who is writing a book detailing his private White House interviews with Clinton, said the former president was distraught by the popular interpretation that he had used code language to diminish Obama. "He was particularly upset about the race card deal," Branch recalled. "He said, 'I hate that phrase anyway. It makes it sound like a game -- playing a card -- when race is not a game and never was. It is deadly serious.' "

There is, from Branch's historical perspective, a natural progression from Clinton to Obama that in other circumstances could have created a political bond. Had Hillary not been in the race, he surmised, "I could see that Clinton might have endorsed him. Obama has a lot of attributes he values."

On the other hand, there also is a sensitive generational issue that further explains the distance between them. For more than 40 years, the country has been riven by a wide and amorphous range of issues and sensibilities that came out of the divisions of the 1960s. Clinton tried to overcome that divide with his notions of a "New Democrat" and a "third way" of looking at policies beyond the classic left and right, but he failed, in part because of the Monica S. Lewinsky sex scandal, which reinforced the stereotype of '60s undiscipline.

The Obama campaign wants no part of those old '60s aggrandizements. As spokesman Burton put it, "We're trying to fight a new fight."

Among the many parallels between Clinton and Obama is that they both first took the national stage with a convention speech four years before they won the nomination -- Clinton in Atlanta in 1988, and Obama four years ago in Boston. But while Obama received rave reviews for his keynote address, propelling him to where he stands today, Clinton bombed out with a speech that droned on and on until he received his loudest ovation for the words "and in closing." He blamed aides to nominee Michael Dukakis for junking up his speech and minimizing its importance by keeping the house lights on.

If there is to be a rapprochement between these two similar men, it more likely will come after the convention. Each has one powerful way that he needs the other. Obama could use Clinton to talk to rural and white working-class people; as one Clinton hand said, "One difference between the two guys is that Obama never had an Uncle Buddy who lived in a trailer." Clinton had a photograph of his Uncle Henry Oren "Buddy" Grisham, the quintessential good ol' boy, on his desk in the Oval Office. And Clinton just as much could use Obama to expiate his falling-out with the African American community.

Did they talk about this in their conversation last Thursday?

No one on either side has revealed the contents of that discussion, but one source said it was "on the right track" to consider the possibility of consecutive joint appearances at a black church and a union hall in Ohio or Pennsylvania -- not quite brotherhood, but two pragmatic and adaptable politicians closing the circle on their discontent.