I ask who among our current-day political leaders Martin Luther King might support; the more appropriate question is who among them would have the courage to embrace a living King as eagerly as they drape themselves in the dead one’s memory. I’m drawing a blank.

Much of the commentary on the anniversary of King’s assassination focuses upon the direction he took in the last years of his life, speaking out against the Vietnam war specifically and state-sponsored violence in general, and attempting to broaden the movement that coalesced around him to include economically oppressed people of every color, not just the racially oppressed ones for whom he advocated so powerfully. He wanted to recast the political and social values of the country to the benefit not just of the disenfranchised here, but for those abroad who suffered from our own and similar military and corporate depredations.

Among the leading presidential contenders, only John Edwards brought even a fraction of King’s outrage and conscience to bear on the economic inequalities that continue to plague and, in many ways, cripple the US. None of the candidates show any sign of feeling the grief and rage King would have felt at what we have done and continue doing to the people of Iraq: hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, millions more robbed of fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, many millions more robbed of their livelihood, their security and any semblance of a normal life.

Can anyone imagine Martin Luther King failing to address the debt we’ve incurred to the Iraqis? or failing to note the uses to which the hundreds of billions of US dollars and tens of thousands of US lives thrown away on the occupation could have been put? or failing to speak out in the strongest possible terms against US policies of kidnapping, torture and perpetual detention beyond the rule of law?

And now, can you imagine Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama embracing what King would have to say? (Never mind John McCain …)

King, and the millions who marched with him, and the tens of millions of others moved by his words, created the space for politicians such as Lyndon Johnson to move forward; there is no one like him today to do the same for Clinton or Obama, and expecting them to create their own space is perhaps unfair.

But they, along with all but a handful of their Congressional colleagues, seem irredeemably trapped of their own volition in the very system King sought to shatter, and when they speak of transforming the system, they really mean tempering and tweaking it. One has to suspect that if we were graced with a presence the equal of King’s, our annointed leaders would maintain a terrified distance from him or her.

Obama, of course, was not much more than a toddler when King was killed. Clinton was a young adult who by all accounts took his message and his death very much to heart. But in the years since, she has developed a keen appreciation of America’s war-making capacity and its utility, something King explicitly abhorred. She, like Obama and Edwards, wants to significantly increase the size of the Army and Marines. Like Obama, she makes rhetorical use of what is euphemestically labelled “our nuclear deterrent,” saying for instance that “all options are on the table” with respect to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. What that means, of course, is that she won’t rule out a first strike with nuclear weapons. How do you suppose King would react to that?

Obama was right when he said in his speech on race that much progress has been made on racial issues over the decades. King would no doubt have lauded that assessment. But how would he have felt about Obama’s casual dismissal, in the same speech, of Palestinian grievances against Israel, which Obama cast as “emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam” rather than “the actions of stalwart allies like Israel”?

Someone, I can’t remember who now, raised the question of how cable TV’s talking heads would cover King. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture Bill O’Reilly’s or Sean Hannity’s take on King’s calls for economic justice and the cessation of America’s economic and military imperialism. Picture too the Kipling-obssessed neoconservative polemicist Max Boot, who said after 911 that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets”, penning, from his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations, a critique of King’s foreign policy positions.

We can’t know how those positions, or King’s position in our society, would have evolved had he lived to continue his work during these past 40 years. It seems sure, though, that he would have been regarded at least during the past seven-plus years much as he was in those last two years of his life: by conservatives as a radical threat to the government and their way of life, and by most centrists and many liberals as at least two steps beyond the pale—accepting his message on racial issues while nervously ducking or flatly disavowing his larger critique of American values and their impact here and abroad. We saw that when Obama disavowed not just the orbital comments of Jeremiah Wright, such as his assessment of AIDS as a genocidal conspiracy, but the more reasonable, if angrily couched, critiques of the country’s actions.

George Bernard Shaw wrote that “[t]he reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” It couldn’t be more clear that however pragmatic he was, however politically skilled, King was an unreasonable man. Clinton and Obama lack that necessary quality, and the presidency of whichever takes the magic oath of office is doomed to reflect that.

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