Her voice dripping with sarcasm, her eyes full of anger and contempt, Hillary Clinton attacked Barack Obama in Ohio for thinking that he could unite the country and that this would lead to anything good: "The skies will clear, the sun will shine, a celestial chorus will be heard and all our problems disappear." Obama is naïve, she insisted; anyone with experience in the ways of Washington knows that if you want to get things done you have to fight, that victory goes to those with power, and that it takes more than words to persuade.
Obama has replied that the way to get things done in Washington is to lead a movement, to bring in congressional majorities when you win the presidency and have the country behind you when you propose major new legislation to the Congress. But something more than sheer numbers is required when change is to be lasting and accepted by the other side.
Lyndon Johnson had majorities in both houses when he proposed the most far-reaching civil rights legislation in our history, and because of Martin Luther King, jr. and the civil rights movement, the country was behind him when he did it, but James Eastland of Mississippi was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and James Eastland believed in segregation. Eastland could have stopped the Voting Rights Act, the act without which Bill Clinton could never have become president and Barack Obama could never have won a southern primary, with a single word, but Eastland let it through. The mystery has always been why. The answer is that Phil Hart of Michigan, known at the time as the liberal's liberal, asked him if he would.
When the Senate was about to take up the Voting Rights Act of l965, Richard Russell, the senator from Georgia - one of the three Senate office buildings was later named for him - was presiding over a meeting of the southern leadership in the Senate, trying to figure out the legislative strategy of the other side. In the middle of the meeting the telephone rang. Hart, who was the floor leader for the bill, was calling to tell Russell exactly what he was going to do. Amazed - but perhaps not entirely surprised - Russell hung up the phone, told the other southern Senators, including Eastland, what he had just been told, and then, looking around the room, remarked, "And that was a gentleman."
Hart was not being naïve, nor was he just trying to be fair. The Voting Rights Act was going to change everything - and everyone knew it. The South, and the country, would never be the same. Hart understood that it was not enough to win; the other side had to be left some dignity in defeat. The South had to know it had been given every reasonable consideration. It was exactly a hundred years since the end of the Civil War; it was not going to be another hundred years - not if Hart had anything to do with it - before the races treated each other with respect.
It was the privilege of fairness, and more than that, the understanding of something indispensable to the decent workings of a democracy. 'It is always a mistake to say of any issue that there is a principle involved," said Hart in dozens of speeches. "There are always two principles, yours and the other person's." Perhaps because of the sheer force of Hart's example, James Eastland understood that; and understood as well that, as against the principle of equal treatment for black and white, his own principle of racial segregation had now become indefensible.
Eastland let the bill through committee. When it came to the floor, where all the southern senators would vote against it in what they knew, and had accepted, was a losing cause, one of them delivered a speech attacking Hart by name. Someone started to rise in Hart's defense, but Hart held him back, explaining that it had all been prearranged. A little verbal abuse from a senator playing to the folks back home was a small enough price to pay for that same senator's quiet refusal to do anything more than cast a single useless vote to stop it.
Eleven years later, when Phil Hart died, James Eastland reminded the senate, and the country, that Hart had been, "Universally admired and respected in this Chamber," and then, in words that prove the power of decency and fair treatment, remarked, "I have never known a man I have been more apart from philosophically, but closer to personally."
Hart sat next to Ted Kennedy in the senate, and Ed Muskie was his best friend, but there was only one picture he kept in his office. It was a picture of James Eastland. Barack Obama would understand that, and that helps to explain his enormous appeal.