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Congressman Emanuel Cleaver is munching one right now. Just heard him say it’s a little sour.
Cleaver endorsed Hillary Clinton for president last summer. Then he sat back and watched as Barack Obama made his steady rise in the polls and carried Cleaver’s 5th District, albeit narrowly, on Super Tuesday.
Now Obama’s 10-state winning streak has him on the brink of the Democratic presidential nomination. Suddenly, groups like ColorOfChange.org are springing up, demanding that superdelegate Cleaver switch his stand and get on board with the rock star.
CNN and National Public Radio are calling with the same questions:
Whatcha gonna do now? Are you really not going to support the man who could become the first black president?
Cleaver has a firm rejoinder, one full of phrases like “ethical entanglement,” and it’s probably the only answer that makes sense. He’s standing pat, thank you very much.
“I’m in the same place I stood when Senator Clinton came to town back at the end of summer,” Cleaver said Friday, recalling his endorsement of her last year when she was 10 miles ahead in the polls. “I intend to remain a Clinton supporter.”
Waffling now, with the heat hitting triple digits, just won’t cut it, he said.
Just as he has done before when the wrath of so many was bearing down, Cleaver turned to pastoral metaphor to explain himself. He told this story to Clinton herself last weekend during a phone call.
Say I’m driving a two-seater down the highway with my white friend Doc Worley. I’ve known him for years and years and years. I look up and see an African-American I know hitchhiking.
Do I turn to Worley and say, “Oh, Doc, here’s a man hitchhiking. You know I can’t bypass a black man, so you have to get out.”
Things shouldn’t work that way, Cleaver said.
“It is irrational to expect me to do that,” he said.
During his administration, President Bill Clinton helped get money to Kansas City for a whole host of projects, including construction of Bruce R. Watkins Drive, a freeway through the middle of town. Cleaver was mayor then.
Clinton has been there for the little things, too. A year ago, for example, he donated his favorite saxophone to the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City.
“For me to say, ‘I know you guys have been my friends, but I’m sorry, I’m out of here,’ I can’t do it,” Cleaver said.
Still, the amount of feedback about his personal choice in the presidential race is reaching hurricane strength. So many phone calls and e-mails that Cleaver now compares the response to what he’s heard, in total, about the Iraq war.
“That’s kind of sad,” he said.
On Feb. 16 at 12:44 p.m., the phone rang and Sen. Clinton was on the line. What the two talked about, he wouldn’t say. Asked if Clinton was aware of the pressure on Cleaver, he said, “Oh, absolutely.
“This woman, who has been vilified, is probably one of the most human people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.”
The experience helped Cleaver reach a conclusion. “It’s not in anybody’s best interest to go into a convention as divided as we are now,” he said.
The Obama phenomenon, he said, continues to astonish. “There is something mysterious and almost unearthly about it,” he said. “A lot of people, even his supporters, are asking the question, ‘What is it?’ ”
Some people, Cleaver fears, are going to wake up one day and wonder what they’ve done.
“If in the end, it can be a benefit to the nation … and benefit race relations in this country, I’ll be one of the primary cheerleaders,” he said.
But in the meantime, Cleaver offers a word of caution. Obama may become the next president. But he can’t work miracles.
“That’s just not going to happen.”
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