Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

This past week as I was driving I found myself listening to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King's final speech, the one he gave in Memphis the night before he was assassinated.

Towards the end of the speech, I was struck by his use of the story of the Good Samaritan, which he presented as a parable of a man reaching across racial lines. He described the Samaritan as “a man of another race [who] came by [and who] decided not to be compassionate by proxy. [Instead] he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying that this was the good man; this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thine,” to be concerned about his brother,” even if that brother was a man of a different race.

At the very end of the speech, Dr. King told a cheering crowd: “ I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

The very fact that today in 2008 we have a white woman and a black man running serious campaigns for President suggests that we are a good deal closer to the “Promised Land” of racial and gender equality that Dr. King evoked. We may even have a chance of hearing the shattering sound of one or another glass ceiling in November if we elect the first black or the first female president of the United States.

However, the emergence of race and gender as weapons to be used directly and by proxy in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns raises disturbing questions about their effects on voters. Not just black female voters who may feel deeply torn between their allegiances to the advancement of women and to the advancement of all people of color, but all voters who are excited by the prospect of having such strong candidates to choose from, and yet dismayed by the inevitable political tendency to go negative.

When the Clinton and Obama campaigns take their jabs at one another, I can't help thinking of the Old Testament tales of sibling rivalry that so often ended in disaster – Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. It's clear that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deeply and even desperately want to win the nomination of the Democratic party, but it may be time for the party leadership to suggest that each risks alienating voters that may be vital to Democratic success if they try to destroy each other's reputation in the primaries.

One thing is certain: whether Clinton or Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, that nominee will face a tidal wave of mud-slinging across the airwaves that is likely to make the Swift Boat attacks look like a school-yard scuffle. There is no need for either of them to give this opposition more ammunition in advance.

Since Clinton and Obama are both self-proclaimed Christians, I'd suggest that they consider another Gospel parable, that of the woman taken in adultery. Not that I'm suggesting that either of them is guilty of the sin in question, but they might want to take Christ's advice to heart when he answered the scribes and the Pharisees: “Let anyone among us who is without sin be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7).

Dr. King responded to death threats by saying that he had been to the mountain and seen the Promised Land, and he died prophesying that all of us as a people would get there. In 2008 the Democratic party has its best chance in years to help achieve Dr. King's vision if its candidates can keep their eyes on the prize and not get bogged down in the political mud.