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Civil Rights veteran John Lewis will soon announce he is switching his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. Is Hillary Clinton listening? It is a decision that could not have come easily for Lewis, who is one of the most principled men to ever hold a Congressional seat. Among the principles Lewis holds high is loyalty.
John Lewis has been a friend and counselor to both Bill and Hillary Clinton since before Bill Clinton became President. He was one of the first African American leaders to endorse Bill Clinton and one of the first to endorse Hillary Clinton. A year ago, on the anniversary of the Selma March, he walked arm-in-arm with the Clintons. I said at the time that those Democrats who did not show up for the Selma March had insulted Lewis and the African American community. Guess who is left in the campaign–the only two who bothered to show up, Clinton and Barack Obama.
John Lewis has a well-earned reputation for fairness, for fighting for equity and, most of all, for moral courage. He was there for the original Selma March and almost gave his life for the cause when he was brutally beaten in the head with a nightstick, leaving him lying on the ground in a pool of blood.
He is a genuine American hero who has never backed down from doing what he thinks is right. That is why colleagues on both sides of the aisle respect his judgment, for in some ways he is the conscience of Congress. Some day, no doubt, his statue will join those of others that stand in the Capitol honoring those who stood for the principles of American Democracy.
Lewis’ long-standing commitment to justice prompted me to nickname him the Lion King in an earlier essay, for he is like an old lion who is universally respected by his friends and feared by his enemies. His words can still cut as sharply and deeply as any lion’s claws.
Lewis’ announcement that he was switching his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama stems from his deepest beliefs and because of that it carries a great deal of weight among those who still believe that the Democratic Party stands not for the “Republican Lite” of the Democratic Leadership Council, but the principles of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman: the government exists to help keep the playing field level.
There was a hint at Lewis’ dissatisfaction with the Clinton campaign during a little-commented-on debate he had with Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the January 14th NewsHour. The subject was the issue of race in the campaign that had been precipitated by Hillary Clinton’s comment about the Civil Rights Movement. Clinton said:
Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In the words of Judy Woodruff:
Some prominent African-Americans seized on those words, saying she had minimized the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., in effecting change during the civil rights era.
This precipitated a dust-up between the Obama and Clinton campaigns into which the NewsHour decided to thrust Lowery and Lewis as spokesmen for the candidates. During their discussion Lewis reminded me of Paul Wellstone when he had to debate Jim Hightower over the role of Ralph Nader in the 2000 campaign. Wellstone appeared visibly uncomfortable with his role. Lewis began:
I knew Martin Luther King, Jr. I marched with him. I worked with him. He played a major role in inspiring people, giving people hope. I also knew Lyndon Johnson.
I think there’s been a deliberate, systematic attempt on the part of some people in the Obama camp to really fan the flame of race and really try to distort what Senator Clinton said. I understand and I think most right-thinking people understood what she said.
Lowery seemed reluctant to join combat.
I’m willing to take Mrs. Clinton’s word. And I chastise those in the media who raised it from that perspective.
But Lewis turned his reply into a pitch for the Clintons.
Let me say, Judy, President Clinton and Senator Clinton have a long record of working to bring people together.
This pattern continued throughout the discussion as Lowery would call for unity, only to have Lewis respond with a pitch for Hillary Clinton. Lewis sounded too strident, too forced, as if he were arguing a case he did not really believe in. That’s a difficult thing to say about John Lewis because he is, above all, a man of principle, but he is also a man of loyalty and in this case the two had to be warring in his mind.
Yet there was something about his continuing to force the discussion back to Hillary Clinton that suggested even then, as the Clinton campaign was reeling from the results of the Iowa Caucuses, doubts were surfacing about the future. A black man had won in a rural Midwestern state full of white people and won in convincing fashion. The Clinton campaign had thrown everything they had into Iowa and still they lost.
A New York Times article written less than two months before Iowans gathered, reported Hillary Clinton had hired 100 new workers with a goal of having 50,000 in-home visits by Christmas, brought eight deputies to drum up media coverage in smaller cities, spent $360,000 on one week of television commercials, and sent for “several senior strategists, including Karen Hicks, who is known as one of the party’s top get-out-the-vote specialists.”
Back then former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack identified what would become the Achilles heel of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
At the beginning, she didn’t understand the whole notion of relationship building. She now gets it. She now understands the psyche of this process.
She never got it. John Lewis had to have seen what Vilsack saw. What must have gone through the mind of the man who once stood up to nightsticks, dogs and fire hoses on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when he saw those Iowa results and then was asked to go up against his old comrade-in-arms, Joe Lowery on the NewsHour? The Obama lead grew and neither his own Congressional district nor his own state followed his endorsement. Then his fellow Georgia Representative David Scott switched his endorsement from Clinton to Obama saying he could not go against the will of his district.
For John Lewis and for the rest of us the path ahead is quite clear. Hillary Clinton can only win the nomination if she pulls off unbelievable twenty-point victories in Ohio and Texas. Her strategy has become too transparent: barring that miracle she can win if she can cut enough backroom deals to sway the superdelegates and then convince the Democratic Party to go against its word and certify her delegates from Michigan and Florida.
This would be the ultimate nightmare, calling up memories of poll taxes, whites only restrooms, restaurants and hotels, backseat bus rides, midnight rides. A black man has within his grasp at least part of the dream Dr. King had spoken of there in front of the marble statue of Abraham Lincoln as none other than John Lewis stood there with him, a young man who would give his very blood for that dream. And a bunch of white folks most black folks have never heard of and don’t care about because they never cared are going to decide who is going to be President?
This is what John Lewis said to that:
In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit. Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.
Les Payne of the Atlanta Journal Constitution has it right:
In taking that terrible beating in Selma, Lewis should be saluted as much for being an American hero as for the narrower tribute as a civil rights hero. His bravery helped make the entire country better. However, just as his courage was pigeonholed, Lewis’ decision to stand with the majority of his constituents will likely be restricted as a pure, racial act – instead of a bow to the democratic process.
John Lewis still has not officially endorsed Barack Obama, but that may be because an old friend and fellow Civil Rights pioneer, the Reverend James Orange died last night in Atlanta.
I can imagine the conversations that must still be going on between the Clintons and Lewis. I don’t know about Hillary Clinton, but I do know that if John Lewis were my friend I would respect his decision, wish him well and hope we could still be friends. And then I would think very carefully about what his decision and what it means.
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