Arkansas Shooting, Summer of Menace

It is poignant to read the last blog postings by Bill Gwatney, chair of the Arkansas Democratic Party, before he was shot and killed Wednesday afternoon at his office in LIttle Rock. He touts a county Democratic Party picnic in Vaughn, and looks forward to the Hope Watermelon Festival. He praises his staff for crisscrossing the state, opening county party headquarters.

Nothing here to hint at what could have stirred someone to murder Gwatney in cold blood, shooting him three times before walking out of Democratic Party headquarters and fleeing in a blue pickup truck, until he was shot by police 30 miles later. Gwatney and the shooter are both dead. A state is in mourning. The sudden, bloody event seems shockingly unexpected.

But we've seen hints of the depths of rage and hate in Arkansas party politics before. Ask the Clintons, who were accused of murder, cocaine trafficking, and generally despised with a vitriol that verged on madness in some corners of the far right. Of all the disappointments of the Clinton Presidency for progressives, one lasting association will always be that Clinton was, as Barbara Ehrenreich memorably called him, a "growth medium" for the far right. A lot of the original Clinton haters came out of Arkansas. During his presidency, rightwing talk radio spread to cable. Frothing rants and wild-eyed accusations, not to mention the whole impeachment sideshow, brought American politics to a new low.

The irony, for progressives, was always that Clinton, like Gwatney, was not the sort of leader who set out to stir up controversy. He was a company man, a DLCer, a friend of Wall Street and corporate power. No civil rights hero, no fiery war resister, no champion of the poor, as it turned out. Clinton was the man who oversaw the tech boom and the "peace dividend," but declined to spend the surplus the economy generated on basic human needs. He abandoned his movement friends early in his first term, left Congress firmly in the hands of the Republicans, and, thanks in part to the peculiar cultural backlash he stirred up, turned over the keys to the White House to the most radical Republican regime in the history of the country.

Gwatney's murder has already started a war of words online about whether rightwing "hate speech" was responsible, or, to turn to the rightwing bloggers, whether the left always looking for a rightwing conspiracy behind every random event. We don't know yet what the shooter had in mind. But we do know that it takes a seriously deranged mind to pick Gwatney, with his upbeat blog postings on picnics and watermelon festivals, as a target.

Somehow, the most mild-mannered Democrats can attract a kind of vitriol you might expect toward a Martin Luther King or a Gandhi, not a glad-handing, pro-establishment, "bipartisan" fan of compromise.

This is true of the Democrats' current Presidential candidate just as it was of Bill Clinton. Whether it is the sunny "man from Hope" image, the meteoric rise of a young man from a humble background who stirs class and race resentment, or just an underground river of hate and fear that is easily stirred up in any case, it is clearly there.

With the end of August and the party conventions drawing near, the menacing rumors circulating about Barack Obama's heritage, middle name, putative ties to Islam, as well as leftwing radicalism are heating up. The shooting in Arkansas adds to the sense of tension and foreboding. It should also remind people in both parties--John McCain as well as Mark Penn, the Clinton pollster who first suggested questioning Obama's genuine American-ness--what it means to play with fire.