Reply #8: The fact that someone inside the Clinton campaign ADMITTED as much is a damned good indicator. [View All]

[Spider Jerusalem]

Hillary Rodham Clinton has won in South Carolina.

No, not Saturday's primary _ though it's no longer outside the realm of possibility that Clinton will defeat Barack Obama here. What she has won in South Carolina is the larger campaign to polarize voters around race and marginalize Obama (in the insidious words of one of her top advisers) as "The Black Candidate."

That's from an Associated Press article; there's a lot more out there calling the Clinton campaign out on race-baiting. Give me ten minutes and I can give you enough links to keep you busy reading for an hour, of commentary from the Washington Post, New York Times, Nation, Atlantic, etc, saying the same damned thing.)

Edited to add more:

Hillary made the mistake of assuming that what was Bill's was hers -- she believed headlines that shouted such things as "Poll: Many Black Voters Don't Identify With Obama."

Now that votes are being counted, the Clintons have changed their tune, suggesting that Obama's color counts more with black voters than her years of service to America.

She tried to sell that idea after her loss in Louisiana's primary, dismissing votes for her opponent as coming from "a very strong and very proud African American electorate." Bill Clinton pushed that line when he suggested that if Obama won South Carolina's Democratic primary, it was because he's a black candidate in a state where blacks are a large share of the population.

"They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender. That's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance of winning here," the former president said.

The Clintons sought to marginalize Obama as a candidate for African Americans. It backfired.

<snip>
Once upon a time, all a white politician had to do to win black votes was to be on good terms with the Congressional Black Caucus, suck up to black pastors and flatter their choirs on Sunday morning, and, oh, yeah, spread around a little money leading up to Election Day.

Those days are coming to an end.

Such condescension today is offensive to African Americans, who expect to be treated as thinking adults.

<snip>

As they used to say in my old neighborhood, the Clintons "low-rated" Obama. Beneath their smiles, the Clintons are constitutionally unable to accept the possibility that he could be viewed more favorably or thought to be more capable of uniting and leading the country than Hillary.

Many African Americans have come to hold that view.

They aren't alone.

(Colbert King in the Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/22/AR2008022202333_pf.html

Bill Clinton, in his over-the-top advocacy of his wife’s candidacy, has at times sounded like a man who’s gone off his medication. And some of the Clinton surrogates have been flat-out reprehensible.

Andrew Young, for instance.

This week, while making the remarkable accusation that the Obama camp was responsible for raising the race issue, Mr. Clinton mentioned Andrew Young as someone who would bear that out. It was an extremely unfortunate reference.

Here’s what Mr. Young, who is black and a former ambassador to the United Nations, had to say last month in an interview posted online: “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”

He then went on to make disgusting comments about the way that Bill and Hillary Clinton defended themselves years ago against the fallout from the former president’s womanizing. That’s coming from the Clinton camp!

And then there was Bob Kerrey, the former senator and another Clinton supporter, who slimed up the campaign with the following comments:

“It’s probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There’s a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal.”

Pressing the point, Mr. Kerrey told CNN’s John King: “I’ve watched the blogs try to say that you can’t trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite the opposite.”

Get it?

Let’s start with the fact that Mr. Obama never attended a madrassa, and that there is no such thing as a secular madrassa. A madrassa is a religious school. Beyond that, the idea is to not-so-slyly feed the current frenzy, on the Internet and elsewhere, that Senator Obama is a Muslim, and thus potentially (in the eyes of many voters) an enemy of the United States.

Mr. Obama is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. And if he were a Muslim, it would not be a legitimate reason for attacking his candidacy.

The Clinton camp knows what it’s doing, and its slimy maneuvers have been working. Bob Kerrey apologized and Andrew Young said at the time of his comment that he was just fooling around. But the damage to Senator Obama has been real, and so have the benefits to Senator Clinton of these and other lowlife tactics.

Consider, for example, the following Web posting (misspellings and all) from a mainstream news blog on Jan. 13:

“omg people get a grip. Can you imagine calling our president barak hussien obama ... I cant, I pray no one would be disrespectful enough to put this man in our whitehouse.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign was always going to be difficult, and the climb is even steeper now. There is no reason to feel sorry for him. He’s a politician out of Chicago who must have known that campaigns often degenerate into demolition derbies.

Still, it’s legitimate to ask, given the destructive developments of the last few weeks, whether the Clintons are capable of being anything but divisive. The electorate seems more polarized now than it was just a few weeks ago, and the Clintons have seemed positively gleeful in that atmosphere.

It makes one wonder whether they have any understanding or regard for the corrosive long-term effects — on their party and the nation — of pitting people bitterly and unnecessarily against one another.

What kind of people are the Clintons? What role will Bill Clinton play in a new Clinton White House? Can they look beyond winning to a wounded nation’s need for healing and unifying?

These are questions that need to be answered. Stay tuned.

Bob Herbert, New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Said Bill Clinton today in Columbia, SC: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."

This was in response to a question from ABC News' David Wright about it taking "two Clintons to beat" Obama. Jackson had not been mentioned.

Boy, I can't understand why anyone would think the Clintons are running a race-baiting campaign to paint Obama as "the black candidate."

Jake Tapper, ABC News
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/01/bubba-obama-is.html

...what we've all learned over the years is that race is a hot commodity, and has been used effectively by all kinds of candidates to stir people up along racial lines. Since Richard Nixon implemented the "Southern strategy" in 1968, which was intended to get Southern whites to side with the GOP due to their anger at the Democrats for passing civil rights legislation, it has been a staple of American politics, especially down South.

It has largely been used by the Republicans over the years, and Democrats have always blasted it as race-baiting.

So the idea that a former president -- a beloved Democrat, especially among African-Americans -- would do such a thing to help his wife was considered nonsense. During CNN's coverage Saturday night of the South Carolina Democratic primary, commentator Carl Bernstein called it "unthinkable."

But it really isn't. Clinton has used race when it suited him over the years. (Check out Rep. Jesse Jackson's book, "A More Perfect Union," where it's covered over six pages.) And a top adviser to the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton admitted to Ron Fournier of The Associated Press in a report published Friday that it was the campaign's intent to turn Obama, who has deftly avoided the race issue, into "the black candidate."

Based on the results in South Carolina, it backfired badly.

Roland Martin, CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/27/roland.martin/index.html

And lots more, if you want it.