t cannot be merely a cloth, not when 6,000 people rallied for it a week and a half ago and nearly 50,000 people railed against it on the Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday. Nor is it merely a local issue, relegated to some backwater that we can conveniently ignore. It has become an issue of presidential character.
South Carolina is suffering from a chronic spasm over its flying of the Confederate battle flag over the state capitol in Columbia. Flag defenders, almost all white, say the stars and bars honors their ''heritage.'' Flag critics, mostly black but aided by white politicians and business leaders who are losing count of the canceled conventions by African-American groups, say the claims of ''heritage'' are disingenuous. They say Confederate nostalgia is inseparable from slavery, lynching, and segregation.
It is so inseparable that Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, S.C., said: ''The vast majority of South Carolina says it's time to bring down the flag now. We cannot ignore that the Confederate battle flag was taken by hate groups. It was taken by the Klan. It became a banner of the segregation-forever movement, and we cannot be insensitive in South Carolina to the feelings of our African-American brothers and sisters when they see that flag.''
The Civil War, 135 years dead, is alive not only in South Carolina but in the 2000 race for the White House. In a debate Monday night in Iowa, Vice President Al Gore and former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley both said the flag ''ought to come down.''
That is a relatively easy call for Gore and Bradley, since neither Democratic candidate is likely to win the white male Southern vote in the general election. Despite the solid reelection of President Clinton and Gore in 1996, the Republican ticket of Bob Dole and Jack Kemp won Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
This makes the Republican candidates the primary source of curiosity. Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain, the two top dogs, have been absurdly toothless over this piece of cloth. The South Carolina Republican primary is seen as a crucial test for both Bush and McCain, coming only 2 1/2 weeks after the New Hampshire primary.
In one South Carolina campaign appearance, Bush said, ''My advice is for people who don't live in South Carolina to butt out of the issue.'' In another appearance, Bush said, ''I view it as a local issue. I've spoken to this issue every time I've come to your state, and I'm not going to say anything more. The people of South Carolina can solve the issue.''
McCain cannot make up his mind what to say. On Jan. 9 on ''Face the Nation,'' McCain said the Confederate flag was ''offensive'' and a ''symbol of racism and slavery.'' But the next day he told reporters in South Carolina, ''Some view it as a symbol of slavery; others view it as a symbol of heritage. Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage.''
The day after that, in an interview at The Boston Globe, McCain said he ''saw both sides'' of the issue but that he would ''dodge'' taking a stance different from that of Bush.
This dodging is dangerous for the nation. The Republicans keep saying how they want to attract people of color. Both Bush and McCain have earned sizable Latino support in their respective Texas and Arizona. The national Republican Party has just launced a $10 million advertising campaign targeted to Latino voters, who are becoming increasingly important in the four most important electoral states, California, Texas, New York, and Florida.
But bowing at an altar of racism that is a swastika to many African-Americans exposes Bush and McCain as men who will have no backbone in the Oval Office over far more serious racial issues. Instead of finding a way to laugh off the flag as a case of Civil War shell shock, the silence of Bush and McCain sends a clear signal that racists still have a home in the Republican Party.
Instead of pointing out to the flag nuts that America has become so homogenized (the flag nuts would say mongrelized) that you can no longer tell suburban Atlanta from suburban Chicago, Bush and McCain would rather try to get away with cuddling up with the most divisive of white men, white men whose ''heritage'' was a war of treason that cost this nation half a million lives.
Instead of saying, ''Gee guys, have you noticed that the Civil War is over?'' Bush and McCain have sent the signal that if you have to pick a White House from which to launch attacks against people of color in jobs, education, and voting rights, Bush and McCain are your soft touches.
After all, if Bush and McCain cannot stand up against a piece of cloth, they cannot stand against much.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
