“When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I’m talking about…. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.”

The Senator’s remarks (made at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration in Harlem) have been blasted by the Bush administration, including Laura Bush, for comparing the current House of Representatives to a Southern plantation. Senator Clinton claims that we “know what [she’s] talking about” — but do we? In Clinton’s parlance, plantations are synonymous with slavery and racism, and perhaps that’s the way it should be given the historical realities of Southern culture prior to the Civil War. But in the South, retirement communities in the Outer Banks are named “Green Plantation,” and the homes of former slave owners are tourist attractions on the historical registrar.

Plantations symbolize different things to different races, political parties, and regions in our nation. I’m no proponent of  the South’s romantic recasting of its past, but Clinton’s use of the plantation as a metaphor obfuscates her point and can only serve to further alienate a region the Democrats must retake. The Democrats don’t need to use contentious symbols in unrelated political dialogue when it’s the homogenous, conservative men and women of the House of Representatives that truly need the nation’s attention.

llouison