"It took a president" to make Dr. King's dream real, said Hillary Clinton in an interview in New Hampshire. In the on-going wrangle about "change" and "experience," "rhetoric" and "reality," Senators Clinton and Obama's altercation about Kennedy, Johnson and King exposed a vital truth.
Obama, responding to Hillary's charge that he was raising "false hopes" about what he could accomplish, said that President Kennedy didn't look at the moon and decide getting there would be a false hope, and Martin Luther King didn't decide segregation couldn't end. That, he argued, would be like Dr. Martin Luther King standing at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and saying, "Sorry guys false hope. The dream will die."
Hillary responded by contrasting Kennedy's experience to Obama's and arguing that ""Dr King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the civil rights act of 1964... [T]he power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president who said 'we're going to do it,' and actually got it done."
Partisans immediately entered the lists. Obama supporters accused Hillary of slurring King and Kennedy. Hillary supporters documented the reality that Johnson actually got the Civil Rights bills passed, whereas Kennedy was, if anything, a reluctant bystander, unwilling to take on the Southern Democrats who ruled the Senate.
But the real lesson is far more compelling. Both Kennedy and Johnson were pushed to do far more than they ever imagined by the movement that Dr. King helped to galvanize. While Dr. King let it be known that he supported the Kennedy and King over their Republican opponents, he drove that movement from the outside, never seeking political office, understanding that it was his role to be a "drum major" for justice, to mobilize citizens of conscience to push the limits of the political debate. He was arrested, gassed, beaten, and eventually assassinated by the defenders of segregation. But he was also investigated, wire-tapped, and slandered by administrations led by liberal Democratic presidents. Liberal politicians and press condemned him for pushing too hard and asking too much. He was abandoned by many of his allies when he came out against the Vietnam War. He was reviled when he moved from civil rights to economic rights, and began organizing a poor people's campaign, calling on the government to guarantee the right to a job for everyone able to work. He was assassinated as he stood with sanitation workers striking for the right to organize and a living wage.
The lesson of the King years isn't a choice between rhetoric and reality, or between experience and change. The lesson of the King years is the vital necessity of an independent progressive movement to demand change against the resistance of both entrenched interests and cautious reformers.
King understood that electing good liberal leaders - whether the young and fresh like Kennedy or the experienced and wily like Johnson -- was necessary but not sufficient. "Freedom," he taught, is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." King called each of us to vote but also to act. "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
Obama is right that there is power in the word, that hope has a true force in the world. Hillary is right that Johnson's experience and forcefulness were vital to passing the civil rights laws. But King's example and lesson is that neither of these is sufficient. It takes a movement to force even a sympathetic president to act.