Besides the "as far as I know" qualifier, she personally has kept her hands clean.
I'm just waiting for her campaign to complain about the plot of 10,000 BC being an Obama campaign ad...

Kevin, you are acting like an enormous concern troll on this.

It is inconceivable that Ferraro is acting solo. Clinton's fake apology "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" does nothing to suggest otherwise, yet you pretend this has nothing to do with Clinton's campaign strategy!

The "as far as I know" "qualifier" is another out of context quote. She actually denied that Obama was a Muslim eight times in a row, starting with "Of course not" the first time she was asked and then repeating "no" multiple times.

I think the whole racism thing -- particularly since it is funneled through Drudge -- smacks of Republican rat-fucking.

I think that Obama has a better chance of winning the general and possibly longer coattails, which is why I voted for him. However, I am quite certain that the minute Hillary is out of the picture "Clinton Rules" in the media are going to turn into "Obama Rules". If the Republicans retake the Senate or the House during his term, I absolutely guarantee that there will be investigations a-plenty into his "corruption" and they'll be trying to through his "sleazy" wife into jail.

Mirror: I don't think you fully understand the meaning of the word "inconceivable."

Actually, it's just the opposite: it's almost inconceivable that Hillary had anything to do with either Ferraro's initial statement or with her subsequent television meltdown. That simply makes no sense at all on any level.

Her insistence to change the rules in Florida and Michigan after she "won" them seems to represent her whole style of campaigning. Why not change the rules if things aren't going your way. Would this be how she would govern? It's how George W Bush has been doing it for 8 years. So I guess I have little problem thinking the the worst of her campaign.

Thank you, Kevin. The tendency for a lot of my fellow Obama supporters to demonize Hillary Clinton is something that frankly makes me a little nauseous. Can't I support Obama for his coat-tails and great ground game without buying into the "Hillary is a monster" package deal?

Still ... I don't think Team Hillary's hands are as clean as you give them credit for. In fact, I think it's possible that they know quite well that the Obama campaign has a tendency to over-react to these things, and is stringing them along ever so slightly.

OTOH, it's clear that Hillary not only "regretted" Ferraro's comments, but "rejected" them at least twice that I heard of -- and in the same sentence. For some reason, the "rejection" doesn't make the headline...

Not that I'm excusing Ferraro. I think she was taken out of context the first time round for what were remarkably clumsy statements. But then she insisted on ratcheting up the intensity and even took it further. So, she had a choice and chose the Mexican stand-off.

Well said. I think it's important to remember that in a couple months, an awful lot of the people who are working at the Clinton campaign will be working on the Obama campaign. (Or vice versa, although I doubt it.) The Clinton campaign is not the enemy, and the same goes for the Obama campaign.

And frankly, the idea that Democratic operatives and media consultants and Clinton supporters and surrogates are so willing to risk and ruin their careers to bolster some sort of crazy, Machiavellian race-baiting strategy during the Democratic primary is pretty bizarre. Especially the assertion that they'd do this right before the South Carolina primary. Especially that they'd continue to do this when it obviously hadn't been working. It just doesn't make sense.

I appreciate the recent push back you've been giving to these stupid election year memes, Kevin.

Trying to step back and look at how this came to a head. First you have Clinton's strong showing in OH, with some exit polling showing that she got 75% of "race matters" vote. Obama folks were pretty crushed and looking to blame something other than their candidate and latched onto the meme that dittoheads had put Hillary over the top in TX. With the primary in PA, a state that has significantly more "race matters" voters than OH, team Obama was bound to be pretty nervous, especially when you consider that the Clinton campaign intended to make a big win there her final and most compelling argument that she should be the nominee.

Around the same time, Kos and Kompany stoked that stupid fake controversy about how the Clinton camp had darkened Obama to make him look more sinister. Fuck me that was lame. The Clinton campaign showed class in not making a bigg fuss about it.

Then you have the hugely polarized electorate of MS, with blacks voting 9-to-1 for Obama, and whites voting in similar numbers for Hillary. Ferraro's comment was like a match set to kindling at that point, with Clinton's reject sans denounce raising more than a few eyebrows. As Ferraro kept digging, so did the commenters here and at other blogs like MYDD. The Obamans raised the anti by bringing up anything that could possibly be considered racist and laying at the feel of Hillary Clinton herself.

Finally, everyone was treated to a taste of what racism really looks like by Mr. Wright. This, thankfully, was enough to make all but the most intransigent Clinton and Obama supporters perfectly willing to change the subject.

Did I miss anything?

Kevin,

Why is there race issues in the campaign? Because that's what Obama is running on, and outside of the Ivy league graduate circles of the blogsphere there are serious unaddressed racial issues i this country, and it's the height of hubris to pretend they don't exist, and then have your online surrogates scream at the top of their lungs about the victim card.

Ferraro comment not racist. Bill Clinton's comment about SC registered black democrats voting black, also not racist. Especially now that we have seen every state from MS-SC vote 80% to 90% for Obama with black voters, registered and independent. If you know city level politicians in major metropolitan areas, this is how the game is played, you use every advantage you can and team Obama has most certainly via proxies on the web screaming about race at the same time the are embracing and laundering all kinds of anti-Hillary nonsense largely 90's round two.

Let me clue you in. Team Hillary does not have a web operation. They are almost completely inoperative when it comes to reaching the online base. Team Obama on the other hand has a very active and savy online campaign. Given this reality, which is the side that's been playing games? The only one that's on the field.

And how do we know that you guys in the blogsphere are eating the Obama victimhood shit up? Because we see it over and over again. We see Josh Marshal's boy over at ABC, we see Steve Benen also from the Marshal shop breathlessly reporting every incident, and David Kurtz from Marshal's shop pushing and pushing, we saw Kos dredging stuff from obscure papers, and we see Matt Yglesias never shutting up about any minor web video or positive spin. And you'll notice these people are all not working class America. They aren't slogging away in the actual conditions that everyone works under, so they aren't concerned that Obama doesn't get down and dirty and do the real work that it takes to achieve racial harmony in this country. It's enough that he looks good and shows up to the right functions and is personable and his speech writers give him the right gravitas.

It doesn't matter to you guys because you don't have friends who are affected by the lack of follow through from policies that are all talk. We're looking at the worst economic situation in the history of our country, and the people who have caused it are pushing it further in the wrong direction. Is Obama going to break his nails fighting them, when many of those guys are his backers?

Case in point.

The Obama Bubble: Why Wall Street Needs a Presidential Brand

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=548&Itemid=1

You can't run on a post racial climate that doesn't exist. You can't be the black candidate and have proxies fight your war for you. MLK didn't run from racial problems. He addressed them in person. And he didn't play victim.

Her insistence to change the rules in Florida and Michigan after she "won" them seems to represent her whole style of campaigning. Why not change the rules if things aren't going your way.

Obama and Clinton both gamed the system, and both continue to game the system. They both sold out FL and MI voters for votes in IA and NH. Obama removed himself from the ballot in MI because he didn't want to give Hillary a symbolic win. Both are reacting to the prospect of revotes in exactly the manner you would expect.

They're both politicians looking out for themselves. SHOCKING.

Of course Hillary hasn't condoned any of the racist bile that her supporters have injected in the campaign. How could she know Bill would go around comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson? It's not like she and Bill talk regularly or anything.

And look how quickly she denounced and rejected Ferraro when she went off about how "lucky" Obama is to be a Black man*. Within hours, Ferraro was forced to resign her connection to the campaign.

OH WAIT... that's how OBAMA handled Samantha Power's relatively benign, off the record, comment about Hillary that got leaked. Hillary let Ferraro continue to spew her hateful stuff on nationally syndicated shows until she made sure every Archie Bunker in Pennsylvania had gotten the message before saying "I am sorry if anyone was offended."

Congratulations on your "even handedness" Kevin. There should be a job waiting for you in the MSM.

*an African-American blogger wrote a post today about how lucky he is: for example, he never loses his drivers license because he has to produce it so often....

there's nothing in Hillary's past to make you think she'd do this, because she has never been so desperate to win and so fatally behind until Obama won 11 in a row.

When her political survival is at stake - you'll see hillary pull every knife she can get her hands on in order to win.

Which campaign is injecting racial politics into the Democratic primary?

This is where people go off the rails. Race and gender would be factors regardless of being injected by either campaign. The majority of these incidents are probably not orchestrated by either side. Perhaps the question should be how well the campaigns and the candidates deal with them when they happen.

Sean Wilentz persisting in pushing back with his insane charge makes me think that this is part of a Clinton campaign strategy. Are we to believe that Wilentz isn't a strategic ally, just some dotty professor who happens to post incendiary bullshit in TNR ? Wilentz is a very smart guy. Smart guys only make incredibly disingenuous arguments if they have good reason.

Smart guys only make incredibly disingenuous arguments if they have good reason.

Or if they have an angle. Wilentz is a longtime friend of Bill Clinton's. It doesn't have to be this insidious conspiracy! That is what Kevin is saying.

An imaginary conversation between Steve Kroft and Senator Obama:

Kroft: You don't believe that the Clinton campaign is behind racist comments against you, Senator Obama?
Obama: Of course not. I mean, that, you know, there is no basis for that. I take her on the basis of what she says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that.
Kroft : You said you'd take Senator Clinton at her word that she's not behind racist comments against you. You don't believe that she is?
Obama: No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know.

Now, don't you go taking anything out of context. Because, ya'll know, "context" always makes things mean whatever you want them to mean, whereas just pointing out what someone actually said is meaningless without "context." This is especially true with qualifiers. They are always "unfortunate" or "inadvertent," never meaningful -- especially out of "context."

____________________________________________

"Wilentz is a longtime friend of Bill Clinton's."

I know that - which was the basis of my point.

No it doesn't have to be an insidious conspiracy - just a concerted effort by folks with common goals. I called it strategy, not "insidious conspiracy." And I think it's naive to assume it's pure coincidence and essentially a series of innocent missteps on the part of the Clinton campaign. And no, I don't think they do it because they're racists. They do it because they want to win at any cost.

I really wish I could still believe that the Clintons are given a bad rep by the media. I really wish I could still believe all that stuff. But aside from the race issue--which it can't be denied that they've been playing fast and loose--I've seen my worst fears confirmed time and again by the Clintons many times during the election cycle.

David Shuster. Samantha Power. People who committed some indefensible but quite minor offenses that happened to coincide with times when Hillary's campaign was in the gutter. And then the Clintons went on to try to ruin their lives--they tried to get Shuster fired and succeeded at getting Power fired. That's what I've taken away from this primary campaign--the Clintons will try to destroy you if it happens to be in their interest. Who cares about the real people out there getting screwed to garner Hillary some sympathy points with middle-aged women? That's politics, as Bill might say.

I'm actually inclined to agree with Kevin to some degree on the race stuff, however--the "face darkening" and 3 a.m. charges are pretty far-fetched. But a lot of the rest of it isn't, and there is a pattern to be found here. Clinton wants to win, and she seems to think she can smooth everything over after she's won.

Congratulations on your "even handedness" Kevin.

Kevin's being earnest. He doesn't recognize Ferraro's racism any more than she does. Just like Jeremiah Wright doesn't recognize his own sexism.

But has she been race baiting? I know we all "know" she has been, but the evidence is spectacularly thin — and, frankly, there's nothing in Hillary's past to make me think she'd do this.

Isn’t there a fine line between something we would call “race baiting” and what is known as a Sister Souljah moment. (wikipedia link)

They've both done their best to hand the victory to McCain.

President McCain - get used to hearing it. They're too busy trying to bury each other to recognize who their real adversary is and McCain is getting a free ride and big wet kiss from the press.

"...there's nothing in Hillary's past to make me think she'd do this

Really, Kevin? That's either an extremely naive view or a stupendous misreading of political history.

The entire Clinton campaign m.o. history has been one where you burn bridges today, with the afterthought that you will reconstruct them tomorrow, after "Mission Accomplished".

It was the great political ethicist Bill who famously said "you gotta do what you gotta do".

As Obama rightly observed in one of his first victory speeches, he was being opposed by an old school status quo that believes in "the idea that it's acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election".

If they are so pathetically desperate to win that they'll advance "the kind of partisanship where you're not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea, even if it's one you never agreed with", do you really think Hillary is oblivious to those in her campaign playing the role of Dick Cheney on any given day?

By Any Means Necessary. It's funny how quaint the expression sounds coming from the lips of Malcolm X, now that the Clintonistas have adopted it as their raison d'être.

Everyone from Rolling Stone to George Will have rightly seen Hillary as the new Nixon.
As Will observed a short time back, the Clinton campaign makes the Nixon administration look like debutantes when it comes to oblique nastiness.

"Nixon specialized in mock-solemn tropes such as "It would be wrong to say" this or that, thereby getting this or that into the political conversation."

After Clintonista Shaheen attempted to turn Obama into The Pusher Man, Mark Penn kept the story bubbling by talking about how uninterested the Clinton campaign is in talking about it: "The issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising."

Over and over and over again. Sure, Hillary is not using race in this campaign, as far as I know.

So your theory is that Geraldine Ferraro was a loose cannon greatly detrimental to Hillary Clinton's campaign? And yet the Clinton organization was helpless to stop her from making 6 or 7 different TV appearances on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX (including O'Reilly and John Gibson!) doing exactly what she said in her letter she didn't want to do - damaging the Clinton campaign?

Of course Ferraro would have stopped if Hillary had personally asked her to!

MY theory is that the Clinton campaign either engineered or, more likely, seized the opportunity to "go there" - hoping that Obama's supporters would go ballistic (as they have) with racism accusations so as many Pennsylvania voters as possible would perceive the race through a black vs. white frame. You call that "stupid," but I don't think it's stupid at all. That kind of framing would be very helpful to Clinton in Pennsylvania, and probably Florida and Michigan as well, not just in delegates but in the popular vote. And she's likely counting on Obama bringing back the African-American and squeamish liberal votes for the general when he joins her on the ticket as VP.

When pondering which campaign is most likely to be responsible for a seemingly risky and desperate tactic, my money's on THE ONE THAT'S BEHIND.

Yes, why, why, WHY would the obama camp push a Clinton's are racist angle? Seiously, WHY? It's preposterous. It's ridiculous. It's insane to even imagine that they would have any desire to move black voters away from Hillary Clinton. So what if when they started this angle Hillary had 55% of the black vote, and now has 10% why would he say this.

Besides, it's not like the media will believe every charge against the Clintons. It's not like pundits feel free to say that Bill and Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected. It's not like everyone says that every single word, gesture, or breath is part of some Machiavellian attempt to steal an election ... oh, wait.

All BS aside, it's very amazing that every time there is a primary in a predominately African-American state someone associated with the Clinton campaign says something that can be pushed as incredibly racist.

The truth is that the Clinton's may have been the most popular white politicians in the black community alive today. Barack wouldn't even be in the race if he hadn't gotten the African-American vote.

Hillary is running a campaign aimed at winning the General Election. Barack is running a campaign to win the noimination. That's why she pitched a heal the party campaign with a unity ticket theme. That's why changed his view on illegal immigrant driver's licenses. (Note to Obama campaign: Illegal Immigrants can't vote, I don't care what Bob Dornan says)

She seems to have forgotten that you have to win the nomination before the GE.

Orlando Patterson is an Obama supporter, and claimed, ludicrously, that Hillary's "3 am" ad was racist; some bloggers, who also support Obama, decided Hillary doctored an ad to make Obama look darker, and the consensus seems to be that the whole thing was pure, unadulterated bunk.

But, you know, being paranoid doesn't mean they are not really out to get you: The fact that some Obama supporters have embarrassed themselves with unfounded accusations of racism, doesn't mean that the Hillary campaign can be absolved of wanting to inject race into the primary. Maybe the Ferraro debacle was not a Hillary campaign plant -- it could have simply been a Clinton supporter embarrassing herself this time, and I confidently predict that before this is over, supporters of both Obama and Hillary will embarrass themselves several times. However, framing the discussion this way misses the point, which is that Obama is a black dude running for President, which is unprecedented, because there's, you know, racism all over. That's why I don't understand why Kevin seems to be waffling over whether Obama's blackness is an advantage or a disadvantage. He did it before, in a previous post on Ferraro's comments, OBAMA'S LUCK, when he decided that "...on balance it's pretty unlikely that Obama's color is a plus on his electoral ledger." "Pretty unlikely"? Really? Since when isn't being black in this country, by any criterion, a pretty big freakin' disadvantage?

Perhaps in certain rarefied California suburbs, racism is no longer an issue and it may even be really cool to be black. But the electorate is still about 3/4 white, and there are many people -- including, sadly, many Democrats -- who will not vote for a black guy. The idea that Obama needs to remind black voters and young white liberals that he's black by bringing up race is incredibly inane: Blacks and young, educated liberals are already for Obama and they've noticed he's black and they either don't care or approve of it! What Obama needs is more white folks voting for him, folks like Hillary's less educated, rural and older supporters (wink, wink, Archie Bunker, nudge, nudge).

Is it really not clear that any mention of race, especially as a complaint against whitey, will work against Obama's candidacy by alienating many whites? Both during the primaries, and especially during the general election? Do we need to waffle on this with a pretence of evenhandedness?

I don't know if Clinton is race-baiting. But it's clear that for her it works -- hell, Ferraro even managed to make everybody forget that Obama won two primaries last week. On the other hand, what advantage would Obama have by having Orlando Patterson remind everybody of scary black men lurking in bushes?

____________________________________________

Obama will lose if he's thought of as the black guy. Maybe not the Democratic nomination, but surely the general. The Republicans are certainly behind some of this.

"Where is the race-baiting coming from?" Answer: to a great extent, from neither campaign. It's coming from the press. The press has a tremendous interest in turning this campaign into a sexism and racism story. It's easy, it's headliney, it sells newspapers. The press is taking every tiny instance of a poorly worded comment or an uncensored thought and blowing it up into major campaign news. I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about this. It does, unarguably, sell newspapers.

Well I plan on voting for the Democratic candidate no matter who it is. My vote was going for Edwards until he pulled out, leaving me with either a good foreign policy (Obama) or a good domestic policy (Clinton).

Most of the hubbub has left me cold, just like Kevin. Just two things really grated on me - the South Carolina Jesse Jackson comment and the recent Charlie Rose interview with Hillary, where she "takes him at his word that he's not Muslim".

Lev- Wilentz is not a long time friend of the Clintons. He covered them as a journalist. He has stated that he has met with BC for about two hours in total. If you can prove otherwise, please do so.

enozinho at 2:30 AM says:

"Obama folks were pretty crushed and looking to blame something other than their candidate and latched onto the meme that dittoheads had put Hillary over the top in TX."

Actually, they latched onto the exit polls that said just that. I wasn't aware that quoting statistics could in any way be considered a meme. That is an interesting ... well, meme.

Wake up and smell the coffee! There was a period of time, not so long ago, when the country was often compared to an abused spouse, and the Bush administration to the abuser. Many people did not want to believe they really INTENDED for their nominees, policies, etc. to BE that bad. It just always turned out that way. Finally all but the 30% dead-enders concluded either that you couldn't be that consistently awful unless you were doing it on purpose, or that it didn't matter whether it was on purpose or not. America wanted OUT of this rotten relationship.

Fact is, whether you blame them, the VRWC, their "surrogates" or whomever, the Clintons are consistently surrounded by chaos and backbiting, along with drama and ruthlessness worthy of a Univision soap opera. We had it for 8 years. As soon as there was any danger of Hillary losing the nomination, it all started again. Blame in on a rip in the fabric of space/time if you must, but when something is stinking up the joint, it is often more productive to go to the swirling center of the stink and remove it. As politicians, the Clintons are great soap opera stars.

Wait - so Samantha Power is now Hillary's fault too?

Honestly, it's as if half the people posting here have never seen a presidential campaign for either the general election of a party nomination, or even an Senatorial campaign before. If you think that Hillary Clinton is engaging in a Rovian campaign, then you must not have been paying attention four years ago, because the current Democratic campaign can't hold a candle to the Bush-Kerry campaign (nor to the Bush-Gore campaign, for that matter). If you think this campaign has been unusually tainted by racism, you must not have noticed what happened to Harold Ford, Jr. when he ran for senate in Tennessee two years ago. (see Republican National Committee and "Harold, call me.")

Honestly, the naivete and the eagerness to find overwhelming "issues" where they hardly exist is like a junior high school lunch room, except that instead of listening to the gossip from the Heathers who eat at that table in the corner, you're listening to inane speculation and substanceless tripe from news sources (and "news" sources).

Look, I suspect that Wilentz (who is not a close personal friend of the Clintons) is wrong about the Obama camp injecting race into this campaign, but I also think that race has been a lot less present than it might have been. If you think otherwise, just wait until the general election!

It is perfectly obvious that the Obama camp is doing the race-baiting. The same shit came up after NH, Super Tuesday, and after Ohio. It's actually pretty amazing how timely these accusations almost always are.

The entire premise of Jason Z is flawed: Race baiting = swift-boating the Clinton(s) and its working. It's the only reason he's ahead. At least JZ got the part right about '72, because that's where were headed.

First of all, it was shown pretty conclusively on a post at DU that kos linked to that Obama's image was darkened. I'm sure it was done because black is beautiful and Hillary was just being generous to her good friend and amicable opponent Barack HUSSAIN Obama. Ridiculous charge or not, it happened to be true.

After the ferraro remarks, the clinton team downplayed them, defended them, blamed the victim, than issued a non-apology apology. Classy as always. And for their good behavior, they were rewarded about a five point bump in the penn polls. No exploiting race for political gain there.

Over the past few months clinton surrogates (and her/Bill) have repeated a variant of every negative trope about blacks: the black as an empty suit (only a speech in 2002), the black as a jive talker (nothing but words, Fairy Tale, Media/voters have been fooled), the black as a drug user and a drug dealer, the black as the Other (in both race and religion; black votes don't count; he won't protect your white babies at 3 am), and demeaning black sexuality.

Aside from the "hey all the darkies voted for Jesse Jackson too, what'd you expect to happen?" and the Ferraro remarks none of the rhetoric was rascist on its own--and even then the remarks just crossed the line. So most of the stuff is simply banal outrageous lies expressed in the usual Clintonian fashion. But note the resonance between the supposed gaffs and the Hillary attacks; they are the same logical points, only not latent enough. And they only happened when hillary was in trouble; they were absent when she was 20 points ahead, lied in abeyance when they backfired, only to reappear when everything was lost--unless Obama somehow became unelectable. Quite the fortuitous coincidence of perfectly timed gaffs.

While none of the individual data points are indicative of an overall strategy of race baiting, let alone dispositive, note the pattern: a surrogate goes as far as he/she can without being unambiguously racist and hillary goes as far as she can while maintaing plausible deniability. So my question for Kevin, all of the Clinton cultists, and the concern trolls is: in any of these flair ups, can you point to a single instance where if Team Hillary had gone a little bit further it WOULDN'T have been clearly racist? It seems to me like when she is in trouble, her campaign has a clear pattern of going right up to the line and dancing all around it--they sometimes trip up and stumble over the line, but only just.

As for the charge that Barack has been exploiting reverse racism, you aren't that obtuse, Kevin. Barack's whole campaign has been about removing the slightest hint of being the black candidate. It's what his whole unity bullshit is about: I'm you're black friend, Barack, your white guilt is absolved--and no, no all those scary angry black men are all gone now, I'm demanding nothing but mutual respect and magical de-racialized ponies.

The ONLY thing that could prevent him from being the nominee is being the black candidate. The Obama camp didn't push a tenth as hard against Ferraro as the Clintons did against Powers. They don't want to be having this conversation, they just needed to set a line well short of where Hillary needs it to race bait her way to the win. There's a huge difference between that and reverse race baiting.

Hillay's team has shown much less scruple in attacking, has nothing to lose, and politically benefits from this issue being discussed. Why it is so hard to imagine there is a disparity in tactics between them and Team Obama?

Is Geraldine Ferraro a sexist?
If you really believe Geraldine Ferraro's remarks were racist, then you must agree her remarks were also sexist too, right? Either that or you, like most in this judgmental conflagration against her, just have never bothered to notice her complete statement: "I was talking about historic candidacies and what I started off by saying (was that) if you go back to 1984 and look at my historic candidacy, which I had just talked about all these things, in 1984 if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would have never been chosen as a vice presidential candidate," Ferraro said on ABC's "Good Morning America." "It had nothing to do with my qualification."

And she is correct. Had her name been Gerard she would never have been chosen by Mondale!! Hello? And there is some evidence to believe that if Barack Obama had been a white man who 3 years ago had been a state legislator, he would not have become the darling of us liberals! Is this really that hard? Or are too many of us too engaged in demonizing to look at the possibility that Ms. Ferraro may have just been a little too off the cuff in her comments, a little too glib, yet innocent really.

I don't understand why blog authors feel it's ok to come out for a particular candidate - if you want to be taken seriously as a 'news/opinions' source it's incumbent upon you to remain neutral. It's one thing for the Times editorial board to endorse Hillary but if a reporter doing a story on Hillary re lets say race baiting came out and said by the way I'm an Obama supporter one obviously would discount what is said. Likewise here: I'm probably going to vote McCain so I have no Obama/Clinton axe to grind but it has been obvious for quite some time Kevin that you're an Obama supporter - and that's the point - it's been OBVIOUS - and so how can an objective observer really take your opinion seriously? I'm mean this post is full of fake objectivity because you've larded it with little signs all pointing in one direction: Hillary is a conniving bitch. The distressing part is that the center-left blogoshpere is rampant with disingenuous posts like this and a disinterested reader should be concerned that blogs seem to want to have their newsy little cake and eat it too - ie the mandate 'serious' blogs want to claim for themselves seems increasingly to be as phony as a Fox.

filmex: "Really, Kevin? That's either an extremely naive view or a stupendous misreading of political history."

With that silly litany of shopworn talking points devoid of substance, followed by your citing of George Will to support your contention that Mrs. Clinton is "the New Nixon," it's quite obvious that the only way you'll ever truly learn about political history is when subsequent events serve to highlight your own current and willful ignorance of it.

Maybe Hillary's campaign really is behind all this stuff. Maybe they really are that stupid. ... But has she been race baiting? ... there's nothing in Hillary's past to make me think she'd do this.

—Kevin Drum

Yes. No. Yes. No.

Client #11: "Barack's whole campaign has been about removing the slightest hint of being the black candidate."

Thank you so much for clarifying that, because this sure had me fooled:

"Barack knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people. Hillary would never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger. Hillary has never had a people defined as a non-person." -- Rev. Jeremiah Wright - Chicago, IL (December 2007)

Kevin,

No matter how much you want Obama to win, you can't change the facts.

Remember the Nevada debate in January. The one where Obama admitted his SC Press Secretary was passing out 4-pages race baiting allegations by Hillary?

So Obama race-baits in January, February, and March but somehow this is Hillary's doing?

Client #11: "First of all, it was shown pretty conclusively on a post at DU that kos linked to that Obama's image was darkened."

And then, the acid kicked in ...

and, frankly, there's nothing in Hillary's past to make me think she'd do this

You should talk to Kevin Drum, who, at Washington Monthly's site, recently wrote: "In January, a slew of Hillary surrogates injected race into the campaign, and even though Hillary herself wasn't responsible for any of it, it struck me that there was just too much of it for it to be a coincidence."

Jeebus. The extent to which people will bend over backwards to deny what seems as patently obvious as things are going to get in politics is extraordinary. Next you'll argue that Carville never commented that if you drag a dollar through a trailer park, you never know what trash you'll find. Because the Clintons have been strong supporters of women's rights (really!), that can't have happened, right? Fucking vast right wing conspiracy.

Maybe Hillary's campaign really is behind all this stuff. Maybe they really are that stupid. ... But has she been race baiting? ... there's nothing in Hillary's past to make me think she'd do this.

Is there anything in her past that would make you think she would send Bill to do a campaign interview on the Rush Limbaugh show?

Has she ever run against a black candidate before?

The Clinton's are opportunists. If she were running against an Hispanic candidate and didn't have the Latino vote she'd have completely different rhetoric on immigration using it to drive a wedge in the party.

The only thing you can look at in the Clinton's past to predict the future is their obsession with doing whatever it takes to win, even if it means destroying the Party to do it.

Donald,
To hold Obama responsible for the statements of persons, e.g. J. Wright, not part of his campaign crosses into the realm of irrational. One difference I see between Wright and Ferraro is that she was part of Clinton's campaign structure and she was actively out seeking media attention, giving interviews and speeches. After she was criticized she redoubled her efforts in the media. Wright, on the other hand, was delivering a sermon to his church in January and apparently not seeking a larger stage for his views. If he has been giving interviews in the national media about this, I haven't seen them.

Race Baiting.. what exactly is race baiting??
What you guys are calling race baiting the rest of us are saying THAT is race bating??
Ferraro a case in point.. Bill Clinton's comment comparing OB's win in SC to Jessie Jackson in SC!
What is race baiting about that??

Normal people who are not part of your elite group are saying WHAT IS RACE BAITING ABOUT THAT?? Well what is? Please explained. I have been involved with civil rights for a long time. To me your charges of race bating are ridiculous. That is why many of us are checking out on this campaign if OB wins the nomination.

You want to see what race baiting is.. Check out Rev Wright.. there are plenty of posts around.

It doesn't matter to you guys because you don't have friends who are affected by the lack of follow through from policies that are all talk.

Rank presumption and false.

As Will observed a short time back, the Clinton campaign makes the Nixon administration look like debutantes when it comes to oblique nastiness.

Now, there's an impartial observer without an ax to grind who's never been known to make statements from the perspective of a detached pundit while secretly working on behalf of a candidate.

Were you guys born yesterday?

I agree that Zengerle is being too simplistic. Racism turns people off in a Democratic primary; there's no way that people's thinking your opponent is racist helps you get your minimum threshold votes to win the nomination.

However, it's a little too late for this:

Which campaign is injecting racial politics into the Democratic primary? Sean Wilentz argues, contra conventional wisdom, that it's the Obama campaign: "tentatively since before the primaries began, and with a vengeance since Clinton's surprising win in New Hampshire."

So what? Hillary's campaign is really probably over now. It's clear that Obama is significantly more popular than her, and that has been sufficiently consistent for awhile. Also, of course, he is winning on the pledged delegates.

For the mainstream media and Kevin Drum or other bloggers to show now that they won't go bit-and-bridle riding along with the Obama campaign, and to show that they're willing to take a critical or realistic look at him doesn't give them a bit of credibility in my eye. The bias has crept in a long time ago, and they've got no one to blame for it except their own cowardice. For all I know an Obama presidency is going to be better for the nation than a Clinton presidency, but the bias was wrong and hope we have a superstar ready to run against the Republicans in 8 years.

there's no way that people's thinking your opponent is racist helps you get your minimum threshold votes to win the nomination.

I'm sorry, this should have read "there's no way that people's thinking your opponent is racist helps the opponent get his/her minimum threshold votes to win the nomination."

The excerpt from Zengerle read to me like he was saying, "Well, there is only a sliver among the Democratic primary voters who are offended by racism, so it wouldn't make sense that Obama was trying to make Hillary look racist." Puh-leeze!

Kevin - You're always decrying the rhetorical excesses of partisans on both sides. So why stoke the fires again with this somewhat empty post that depends on thee-layers of mind-reading to be correct?

As a wise man once said:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Kevin still hasn't figured out that Ferraro FIRST made these remarks on right-wing radio (John Gibson), and continued making them on right-wing TV, where she is an analyst.

If she were going to blow a dog whistle, why not on the network(s) that dogs listen to? And isn't it conceivable that TERMINALLY STUPID Mark Penn figured us cats wouldn't be over there listening? And how convenient - right before the blue-collar PA primary.

With all that in mind, what are the odds against this thing being totally freelance? Astronomical, IMO.

The benign neglect started in January. And frankly I think the reaction of "neutral" Clyburn was orchestrated with Axelrod.

Team Obama let the charges bounce around for a week or so and as they started to die down Clyburn stepped in with an announcement of his disappointment. Four or five days later an official memo was circulated from the Obama campaign summarizing the "pattern" of race baiting. Somewhere along the line Obama eventually put out an anemic "I don't think Hillary is racist" comment.

Once baseless charges are out there Hillary had absolutely no way to stop the discussion. The only way to kill it would have been for Obama to immediately come out and say they were ridiculous. He didn't.

I think this whole style of campaign is spectacularly divisive for the party. The damage is done and Hillary is the least of the victims. Although I'll gladly vote for Obama/Axelrod, I'll also freely call them assholes (or was it shitheads?).

How could she know Bill would go around comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson

For the love of God, what the fuck is wrong with Jesse Jackson? I've been out of the country several times over the last decade. Did he kill his ex-wife or something.

I was supporting Hillary up until the last couple of weeks. I am greatly disappointed in the recent behavior of her campaign. Thankfully the only real candidate for change has thrown his hat in the ring, Ralph Nader.

Of course he has no chance and likely Obama will be the next president. There will be some interesting and nasty debates ahead for him. I hope he picks a strong cabinet and I am sure he will be a great ambassador. I just hope he turns out to be as good a leader as he is an orator. I am sure that many of us can agree that Reagan was the former but not the later.

Now that the official tally of major media and campaign figures noting the importance of the African American vote to the Obama candidacy has gone from 7,835 at the time of the SC primary to a cumulative 2,453,658 following LA, MD, VA and MO, can we quit pretending Bill Clinton's perfectly rational observation was "revolting" "dog-whistle" race baiting? Please.

Doug r: read somerby – the “as far as I know” meme is a media-created shibboleth

Mirror: so the brilliant strategy was to drop the race card in a tiny daily in Torrance CA and rely on Obama fluffer Kos to pick it up…? You’re an idiot

Patience: you’re so right about Marshall, Kos and Yglesias – my respect for them has gone way away down

Dave in Portland: the 90’s called, and they want you back…

Mainn: what a brilliant observation – PLEASE start your own blog. Tool.

Filmex: thanks for taking time away from your ongoing investigation that PROVES (really – this time) that Hillary murdered Vince to drop your science on us in comments. We’re truly blessed

Brooksfoe: ahhhh…! Halfway down the comments thread we finally get both heat AND light. Let me see: democrats divided and sniping, democrats self-destructing, democrats playing (as usual) identity politics…. When oh when have we heard this before…? I REMEMEBR NOW…! Every 4 years.

Dirk: we’re all glad that you’re going to vote democratic, but if you don’t know to whom/where Hillary made her (taken out of context) ‘as far as I know comment’ then: pretty please with a cherry on top - STFU.

Bluewave apparently doesn’t know the difference between a chicken and an egg.

AF: don’t you know EVERYTHING is Hillary’s fault…?

Keith: you have the distinct honor of being the second poster in the entire thread to have anything intelligent to say. The award is in the mail.

Jb64: you’re SOOOOO right…! The Obama camp is clearly taking the tried & true route of injecting race into the campaign, which has been a sure-fire winner since we had our first black President elected in 1868. You should thank God for Velcro, because you’re clearly too stupid to tie your own shoes.

Client #11: quote: “none of the…data points are indicative of a strategy…” but I’ll become incensed about the ‘strategy’ anyway…! ROTFLMAO

Sammi: Shush, you silly….! You can’t be HONEST on these threads…!

Don Ho: what the (clearly overexcitable) Rev. Wright says is now, ipso facto, Obama campaign strategy….? I thought we had plumbed the depths of inanity with client 11, but only two posts later, you top him…! Bravo..!

Some call me Tim: some call you stupid as well

Da5id: Nice recitation of RNC talking pints – succint too. Now go back to LGF where you belong. Tool.

Sister Souljah: I guess it was hyperbole in some sort of other context, but she did suggest we have a national "kill white people" week. To quote Clyburn "all of us should be careful about what we say about [insert --killing members of other races-- here]".

And as long as we're saying what we think I really find a lot of Wright's preaching offensive. I'd be a bit more comfortable if Obama was a Muslim.

I was listening to the Clinton interview regarding Obama's 'Muslim' religion, and the reason the interviewer kept coming back to it was that she wouldn't give a foresquare answer. "As far as I know" was completely consistent with her dancing around the issue during the entire discussion. There is an alternative explanation, not pretty but not race-baiting. HRC herself, and the campaign, simply never gives quarter on anything. Never concede, never explain. In a situation where she could 'help' Obama, she simply won't do it.

Even when it would help her. Had HRC, instead of getting into the ridiculous 'denounce' vs. 'reject' thing turned the Farakhan question back on Russert (this is ridiculous, not what we should be debating about, etc), she would have been the clear winner, it would have been a repeating clip the next day, and everyone would have praised her on it. But it's just not in them; straightahead hardball is just what they do.

It's consistent with the fact that the HRC campaign is inflexible and being run like nothing has changed since 1992-1996. They have no flex in strategy at all. Obama / Axelrod are still running rings around them on fund - raising (small donors being for losers and all), on grassroots organizing (existing machines being the grownups way to go) and on image, even with the battering.

She doesn't have the spontaneous speaking and reactive skills that allowed Bill Clinton to thrive in that environment. Not even a little.

This pattern doesn't mark the Clinton campaign as race-baiting, but it does mark them as a few-note, inflexible, strategically limited campaign. Given HRC's cap (iow, the fact that 48% of the electorate is already out of reach), sadly her candidacy bodes ill for the general.

Actually I think it's very likely that Obama's campaign has been the primary driver behind this brouhaha -- and in a strange way that makes me feel better about him. I voted for Clinton in part because I have doubts about his ability to punch and counterpunch in what I have absolutely no doubt is going to be a very dirty general election campaign -- doubts if you will about his toughness, which I do think is an issue and not an unreasonable one.

However starting with the strange story about hyping the photo of him in traditional African garb, I began to think that if this was a conscious strategy on his campaign's part then it was a very clever one. It's a two-fer. He gets to accuse her of racism, a very potent charge at least among Democrats. But also he gets out a picture that was going to come out anyway in the general election, gets it out early, and shapes the story line about it, namely, you'd have to be a sick racist to even put this out there. The media have repeated that line. When the Republicans trot this stuff out in the general, should he be our nominee, all he has to do is remind everyone of how shameful we've all already decided this is.

Low, but very sharp. It isn't exactly the new politics, but like a number of other people have said, I'm not looking to politics for a transcendent experience. I'm looking for someone who will do what needs to be done to win and to move the country forward.

These are the Clintons. Bill "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is" Clinton. Masters of language parsing. The MLK comments? I can believe that was just a tone deaf mistake, but tone deaf nonetheless. The SC comments? A mistake? Bill "accidentally" slipped with a comment that marginalized his opponent? Right.

The problem with Hillary's comments on Barack being Muslim start way before "as far as I know." They start near the beginning with, "I take him on the basis of what he says." It's like saying, "the defendant says he's innocent, and I believe him." It's very nice to be supportive, but when you're willing to say something stronger than "because he says so" --- an in "there is nothing to base that on" --- why water it down with a reference to personal testimony? That's the "context" for her "as far as I know" addendum.

Ferarro is an idiot. Trying to defend her comments as "honest" is beyond lame. At best, the truth of her comments is unknowable. For her to proclaim the unknowable as fact... maybe that's why Fox likes her.

And when was the last time ANYONE thought of Ferraro? Maybe she was just trying to gin up a little more limelight for herself, but it speaks ill of a campaign to have so many out of control speakers on board--not to mention Mark Penn making himself the focus of the Clinton campaign. If this is how she's going to run the White House, it'll be Bush's third term.

And when was the last time ANYONE thought of Ferraro?

The last time I thought about her was when she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. I'm not too concerned with the current brouhaha (as I've stated before the primary election has been over for a long time) -- but I thought it was pretty bad taste for TPM to call a 77 year old female cancer survivor and a past democratic vice presidential nominee "the clown parade."

Once again the omnipotent Donald from lalalala I don't want to here anything bad about my candidate has spoken. Hushed silence should follow the Donalds every proclamation. Sorry D it's time to wake up and smell the Kona. Hilary is a hack.

I think this whole discussion proves what I said yesterday. Regardless of how much we pat ourselves on the back we're not mature enough to have a major political race featuring minority or woman candidates, and not have race or sex be an issue.

It's a shame. And read again what J. Bean says at the top of the thread, at 2:07 AM: Read it twice. I think the whole racism thing -- particularly since it is funneled through Drudge -- smacks of Republican rat-fucking. And here we are cheerfully putting our leg in the trap, again and again and again.

Is the Clinton campaign really stupid enough to piss off such a huge segment of the Democratic voting bloc, i.e. the African-American community?

Thank you, Kevin, for saying on a front page what I've been saying in comments wherever I see it. I voted for Clinton, but I'm perfectly content to see an Obama victory. I don't like either side demonizing the other candidate and the portrait I've been seeing of Hillary lately has been repulsively familiar, to say the least.

*

Drum: But has she [Clinton] been race baiting?

Yes.

Is Hillary a flat-out racist? No.

But her campaign's predilection - and she is responsible for what her representatives say to the press when they are speaking about the campaign - for pointing out, over and over again, that Obama is black is an incredibly cynical ploy intended to drive Obama's negatives down to Clinton's own level...with the added effect of damaging an Obama candidacy for the general election. The strategy is dirty, divisive and would make Lee Atwater proud. That's not a compliment.

I was really hoping that we could all rise above how we feel about race and gender and focus on what it takes to make America better for everyone, but to many of us are not good enough people to do just that, which is too bad. Believe it or not, there are bigger concerns than how much support a candidate is getting from a certain demographic. Case in point:

Mary on March 14, 2008 at 9:43 AM:

He would not have won so many caucuses without that solid bloc vote (or the youth and academic vote also swayed by it).

Really; that's like something you'd read on Powerline. Enough, already.

Wow, Kevin lets some racist ass shit stay on this board...

Long, random thoughts on this that I'm sure no one will read:

1) As an Obama supporter who is trying very much to maintain my respect for Clinton, when there have been allegations of race-baiting I have tried to look at the comments in questions as if they had been made by a Republican. If a Republican had made Bill Clinton's Jesse Jackson comment, the Bob Johnson/Bill Shaheen drug comments, or Ferraro's repeated comments, I would have been livid. The 3am ad, the LBJ/Martin Luther King comment - not so much.

2) On the other hand, as a white person, I try very hard not to tell black people what they are and are not allowed to think is offensive. I don't see anything racially charged about the 3am ad - if I were an older black man, might I view the ad differently? Sure. Might there be a dynamic with the LBJ/MLK thing than I'm just not getting? Sure.

3) I think there are two problems for Clinton with this whole issue. The first is that once people think there has been some amount of racially charged dog-whistling in a campaign, it's going to be all the more easy to believe it's happening again. This is why I think Bill Clinton's Jesse Jackson comment was really bad for her campaign. There was really no reason for him to, without prompting, throw out the comparison to Jesse Jackson specifically other than to at least seed the idea that Obama's win in SC was because he was black. People can make their own judgments about whether this was an ok thing to do or not but, once it happened, it gave people the idea that the Clintons were willing to "go there."

The second problem for Clinton is that, from the beginning, they (with ample help from the media) were really pushing the idea that they were a fantastic, disciplined, crafty, "willing to do what it takes to win" campaign. This was the story for about a year up until they lost Iowa. So, when these incidents happen, it's easy to see why many have a hard time believing that they were not accidents, that the campaign had nothing to do with them, etc.

I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. The Clinton campaign has at times, starting with the Jesse Jackson comment, for tactical reasons sought to diminish Obama's victories in some states as tied to his skin color. They, and this is obviously well-documented in other areas, have not been as nearly as disciplined a campaign as anticipated, and the drug comments and Ferraro's comments are examples of them not being able to control their surrogates.

I also think that the Clinton campaign has just generally been not as good at navigating the race issue as I think the Obama campaign has been at navigating the gender issue. The reality for both campaigns is that there are things you could do in a "normal" race between two white men that would be more problematic in this race. A great example is the whole photo-darkening incident. You can't look at that photo and say it has not been darkened. But it has also obviously wholly darkened - in other words, it wasn't just Obama that was darkened, it was the background, etc. Darkening a photo is standard political stuff; it makes the opponent and what you are attacking look more sinister, etc. I am sure they would have done the same thing if Obama were white, but he isn't. And it was really stupid for the Clinton campaign to not realize that, by darkening the photo, they were opening themselves up to people taking offense. Is it unfair that the campaigns have to be more careful about this stuff? Maybe, but it's reality.

If you use race to try and knock a black opponent out, you're a racist. IT doesn't matter if you think black people are inferior or not. If you are willing to play to such notions to gain power, that is the very heart of racism. Racism isn't just about hatred, it's about self-serving power-plays as well.

Hillary Clinton is a racist.

Dagome: Do you have any idea what you're talking about...? Here's the f*cking transcript:

KROFT: You don't believe that Senator Obama is a Muslim?
CLINTON: Of course not. I mean, that's -- you know, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that.
KROFT: And you said you'd take Senator Obama at his word that he's not a Muslim.
CLINTON: Right. Right.
KROFT: You don't believe that he's a Muslim --
CLINTON: No. No. Why would I? There's no --
KROFT: -- or implying, right?
CLINTON: No, there is nothing to base that on, as far as I know.
KROFT: It's just scurrilous --
CLINTON: Look, I have been the target of so many ridiculous rumors. I have a great deal of sympathy for anybody who gets, you know, smeared with the kind of rumors that go on all the time.

How is it HRC's fault that after being badgered and re-asked the question, she let's slip the "so far as I know..." phrase...?
How is it HRC's fault that Kroft didn't simply move on to the next question after she CATEGORICALLY ANSWERED: "of course not. I mean, that's -- you know, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that."
THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE END OF IT.
NEXT F*UCKING QUESTION.
But because an MSM ratf*cker asks over ond over again and she rephrases, it's all part of a nefarious planned plot on her part...?
Your stupidity is simply collossal.

But has she been race baiting? I know we all "know" she has been, but the evidence is spectacularly thin

Were you expecting she might approach a mic and utter, "That nigger ain't fit to operate no White House."

which, Mrs. Ferraro nearly did. And continued doing in front of several news broadcasts, while under the (unpaid) employ of the Clinton campaign. She could have been shut down in a second, and she wasn't. And I'd probably let the whole thing slide if I felt the Clinton crew was sincerely apologetic and committed to not saying anything race related about Obama.

In this post-B/sh world, we can't respond to offense with Chamberlainesque calls for moderation. If she fucked up, make her stop it -- and then let's get on with it.

To the larger point. I think it's a glass half empty / half full argument. If you think white democratic voters on average respond positively to racism you're biased one way. If you think white democratic voters respond negatively to insinuated racism you're biased the other.

In case you're wondering Axelrod honed his message in state wide races in liberal Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois (with Daly, Spitzer, Patrick, and Obama) and not in Louisiana with David Duke.

Another thiong. a lot of people are sick of the 'you can't prove 100% that I'm a racist' trick. We've seen people like the Clintons pull this shit and then say 'You can't prove it was racist!' as if that makes a difference.

At some point, things become self-evident. It's hard top prove, on paper, that Pat Buchanan is a racist. We could 'prove' to this standard that Trent Lott was being racist when he said what he said. We couldn't 'prove' that George Allen knew what Macaca meant. We had to use our own judgment.

What Kevin Drum seems to be saying here is that we're just not allowed to call Democrats racist, because that's something only Republicans are. I'm sorry, but charges of racism can't be political, and Democrats can be racist every bit as much as Republicans.

mhr on March 14, 2008 at 10:34 AM:

I don't who Obama can blame for [Jeremiah Wright].

Well, mhr, I think he blames Jeremiah Wright for Jeremiah Wright:

Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done."

If Obama is a black nationalist...blah, blah, blah..

Man, you could have stopped after the first part I excerpted and actually appear rational, but noooo....

Kevin,
You don't need to convince us that you're an Obama supporter and that Hillary's run a terrible campaign. That's Kos's territory (and wow am I getting tired of it). I like you much more when you stay out of the "he said she said" crap and write on more interesting topics.

I think a much bigger problem in this primary is the "You can't prove you're NOT a racist!" charge, which is what Kevin seems to be saying.

Who started injecting race into the campaign?
Here's a data point: in June 2007 the Obama campaign send a press release to reporters (specifying that it was not to be attributed to the Obama campaign) that refers to Clinton as "D-Punjab."
See http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/memo1.pdf

There aren't any angels in this.

Am I the only person in the United States of America who remembers this comment by Jesse Jackson, Jr., Obama's national campaign co-chair, in early January?

...there were tears [Clinton's] that melted the Granite State. And those are tears that Mrs. Clinton cried on that day, clearly moved voters. She somehow connected with those voters.
But those tears also have to be analyzed. They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina where 45% of African-Americans who participate in the Democratic contest, and they see real hope in Barack Obama.

But the entire media, and a whole slew of gullible citizens, think CLINTON is the one who's injected race into this campaign?

I had been hoping that Obama would get the nomination (Edwards was my first choice), and I still prefer him to Hillary Clinton, but the grotesque unfairness of the coverage of HC and resultant public hostility towards her esp. from Obama supporters has just made me sick to my stomach.

I may just sit this fucking election out, I'm so damn sick of this.

Mary: Who benefits from this so-called race baiting? It is clearly Obama.

Anyone who can say something like this has never...

...been or known a woman in a majority male situation who has been accused of being "too aggressive" and, when she protests such double standards, is seen as then proving that she's an aggressive (insert female-specific insult here: harpy, shrew, harridan, ball-buster)...

...been or known a black person in a majority white country who is accused of not earning the status he has and, when he protests such double standards, is accused of "playing the race card."

It's been distressing to find that some white women can't connect the dots between their own experiences and Obama's. It reminds me of Tiger Woods defending Augusta for not admitting women. You'd think the idiot would have been able to draw the line between race and gender in that one--what does he think Augusta would have done with him a few short years before?--but no.

There is no way, no way at all, for Obama to win this conversation or this election if it becomes race-based. If he is depicted as the Black Candidate for Black People, he loses. It's that simple.

Don't you think he knows that? Don't you think the Clintons do, too?

We knew this was going to be about race and gender the day Obama announced his candidacy. It was a cold and calculated decision on his part to start a run for president before he acquired the necessary experience. Some cynical political adviser must have convinced him that a divide and conquer strategy against Hillary just might put him in the White House.

I don't think he will survive the general election. I just hope the super delegates are smart enough to not validate these kind of cynical political machinations.

We have a good shot at not only winning the White House with Hillary, but also of fixing the nation that George Bush has so thoroughly f'ed up.

Jennifer: Long, random thoughts on this that I'm sure no one will read

I did, and thought they were wise and fair.

Gadzooks, that post could be cut in half, at least. A few basic points to put all this in perspective:
1) January is a hundred years ago in campaign time.
2) Wilenz has pretty much lost all credibility as a commenter on this campaign.
3) An obscure academic posting a bizarre, not to say self-parodic, deconstruction of an ad in the NYT doesn't really compare to Geraldine Ferraro's public meltdown, as she careens from TV camera to TV camera, from (as near as I can tell) every single show on FoxNews to Good Morning America and the Today Show, fixing her image in the public imagination as the crazy old aunt who's all upset about the "colored" family who bought the house down the street. Never mind the Clinton campaign, does know on in her family love her enough to tell her to just stop, to stop destroying her own legacy in public?

rk on March 14, 2008 at 11:12 AM:

Who started injecting race into the campaign? Here's a data point: in June 2007 the Obama campaign send a press release to reporters (specifying that it was not to be attributed to the Obama campaign) that refers to Clinton as "D-Punjab."

Was that a way to inject race into the campaign or a jab at Clinton for supporting the outsourcing of American jobs?

The Punjab reference came from a joke Clinton made herself at a fundraiser hosted by an Indian doctor when she said "I can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily, after being introduced by Singh as the Senator not only from New York but also Punjab."

Most of the document accuses the Clintons' of investing in Indian companies that outsource jobs to India. One article said Clinton helped outsourcing pioneer Tata Consulting and then quotes her as saying the company "actually brought jobs to Buffalo. Outsourcing does work both ways."

There aren't any angels in this.

Yes, you can say that - none of them are clean - but it's hard to say that the example you've cited applies, rk.

Let's keep our eyes on the prize, boys and girls. We want a liberal Democrat in the White House and we want TO SAVE THE COUNTRY. While the best populist liberal (Edwards) is out of the race since he couldn't get any attention because of all the media focus on the two "first ever" candidates, still both are somewhat liberal.

So, I go back and forth being annoyed at the unscrupulous David Axelrod (Obama's media manager) who I think stirs the racist pot in the Obama campaign, and Hillary who seems to lose herself in a campaign, still IF WE DON'T LOSE OURSELVES WITH THIS NAME-CALLING we could actually win the White House and change the country... perhaps SAVE the country. Keep your eye on the prize.

Demonizing gets us John McCain and his 100 Years War

shortstop,

It makes even less strategic sense for Clinton to bring race into the campaign. The only way for a Democrat to win the Presidency is if he/she gets an overwhelming share of the black vote. White people tend Republican in this country. According to The Black Commentator,

In 2000 Bush won the white vote by 12 points, 54-42; in 2004 he increased this to a 17-point margin, 58-41.

It was black voters who put Gore over the top (in popular vote) and who brought Kerry to within a couple of percentage points.

If Hillary alienates black voters, she loses the general election. She knows that perfectly well.

I agree with you, Kevin, and have been sorry to see these charges of race-baiting thrown around so recklessly. I've been a fervent Obama supporter since his Senate race. I've admired Hillary in the past, and have been appalled at how irresponsible many of her tactics have been in this race. But I just don't think her capable of deliberately trying to appeal to racism, through surrogates or any other way, and I don't see any evidence of her having done so that would persuade anyone who wasn't already predisposed to think ill of her.

That said, I wish that the Obama campaign had merely shrugged off Ferraro's remarks as silly but innocuous, and let it go at that. Purely as a tactical matter, I'm convinced that the whole episode hurts him more than it does Clinton, and will be a liability to him in the general. If the Obama camp had given Ferraro the benefit of the doubt (even though she doesn't actually deserve it) and brushed aside her remarks as dumb and unfortunate things said by a basically good person, they would have earned a lot of good will among older white voters, and particularly older white women, who are anxious and defensive about their own racial attitudes. There are a great many Americans like Ferraro who bristle at the notion that anyone could accuse them of being "racist," and remain only dimly aware that many of the well-meaning, paternalistic attitudes that seemed so liberal and progressive in 1965 have been hopelessly compromised for a long time now. Of all the ridiculous things Ferraro said in all those stupid interviews, one of them is surely true: Obama is going to need people like her.

Evidence is thin! Evidence is thin! Ferraro? Ok, well, it's overblown!

I don't think Hillary is racist, either. But that's also a strawman--I'm not wasting any time on that. The real question is, is Hillary using desperation tactics? Yes! McCain fluffing, Ferraro, Farrakhan, claiming Michigan was "fair"...it's all crap.

And that's enough for me.

If Hillary alienates black voters, she loses the general election. She knows that perfectly well.

She does know that, Daryl, but I don't think she's thinking about the general election right now. From not planning for any races past Super Tuesday, to failing to build ground operations in more than a few states, to running out of money because she spent it all too early, to praising McCain's qualifications over Obama's, to calling herself the security/experience candidate in an attempt to define herself against Obama (but not considering how badly she will do against McCain with those parameters), Clinton's campaign has been a series of short-term tactics that work against a long-term strategy.

"We'll Worry About That Later" would have been a more appropriate campaign slogan than "Solutions for America." So it's not hard to see that right now she's focusing on Pennsylvania, hoping that if she can get a perceived fingerhold she might be able to woo enough superdelegates to keep her in the race.

Patrick is dead on with this: That said, I wish that the Obama campaign had merely shrugged off Ferraro's remarks as silly but innocuous, and let it go at that. Purely as a tactical matter, I'm convinced that the whole episode hurts him more than it does Clinton, and will be a liability to him in the general. If the Obama camp had given Ferraro the benefit of the doubt (even though she doesn't actually deserve it) and brushed aside her remarks as dumb and unfortunate things said by a basically good person, they would have earned a lot of good will among older white voters, and particularly older white women, who are anxious and defensive about their own racial attitudes. There are a great many Americans like Ferraro who bristle at the notion that anyone could accuse them of being "racist," and remain only dimly aware that many of the well-meaning, paternalistic attitudes that seemed so liberal and progressive in 1965 have been hopelessly compromised for a long time now.

I thought the Sean Wilentz article was well-reasoned and well-argued. But, of course, he must be trashed. He's a friend of the Clintons, and therefore can't possibly be telling the truth.

What's sad is that the Democratic candidates have to tip-toe not only in front of the people -- at least some of that goes with the territory -- but also with Tim Russert and company. 99% of these controversies are media-generated. The big TV reporters are pro-Republican, to a person, whether born in Buffalo or otherwise. They are certainly pro-McCain. If Hillary had said to CBS's Steve Kroft (or anyone else) grilling her about her belief about Obama's religion what she knew she should have said -- "This is a ridiculous question, Steve" -- the networks would all circle the wagons and make 100% certain a Democrat who would dare to show up a prominent journalist would not get elected. That would happen even if Obama echoed her. Democrats unfortunately have let this happen, with no apparent strategy to neuter the Russerts and Matthews's of the world. Right now, only the blog reading world is carrying the water. I would like to see someone who has nothing to lose, in a situation where the networks have no choice but to show it -- like maybe Ted Kennedy at the Convention, seriously take on the pundits, sometimes by name, and demonstrate to the world how they have been bending reality.

Soullite: how do I prove I'm not a racist...?

Back to the original post. How did Clinton incontrovertibly screw up with respect to Samantha Power? By saying an apology is not enough? That's pretty thin gruel as it's pretty hard to imagine a sincere apology to obviously sincere statements concerning Hillary's role at the right hand of satan.

Put another way, Daryl, I don't think Clinton is focusing on how she can win the nomination. I think--and everything her campaign has done has supported this--she's too busy focusing on how Obama can lose it.

It's way too late for this, but when the candidates first started campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, we should have insisted that candidates sign a pledge saying something along the lines of:

My number one priority is to elect a Democrat to the Presidency and end the ruinous Republican misrule of this country. As I campaign for President, I swear never to make an attack on my fellow Democratic candidates that decreases our party's chances in the general election, even if it helps my own chances to win the nomination.

That post just confirms Jason Zengerle's point.

Clinton would give McCain much more of a fight then Obama will. McCain will take 40-45 states against Obama.

Besides, unless McCain has some pictures of him doing something stupid show up or he has some kind of medical issue, it's obvious that he will be the next POTUS.

I blame the Dems for running such weak candidates.

steveconga: How is it HRC's fault that after being badgered and re-asked the question, she let's slip the "so far as I know..." phrase...?

Hmm... I dunno. Maybe because she actually qualified her denial with, "I take her on the basis of what he says" and again with, "As far as I know." I mean, why qualify a denial? Even if we were to agree that her qualifiers were unfortunate or inadvertent, it is not unreasonable to assume that she's rejecting the rumors on one hand, while on the other hand she is allowing for the possibility of the rumors being true.

You can keep posting the transcript and perhaps the best we can do is agree that this is a Rashomon moment, where each partisan either sees or doesn't see that her qualifiers are actually words within sentences and therefore meaningful. What I can't figure out is why you are so dismissive of anyone who thinks what what someone actually says is meaningful. Colossal stupidity, indeed.
____________________________________________

I do not support Hillary Clinton and have always maintained that it was amazingly selfish of her to put her ambitions above the needs of the country by spending the last six years setting herself up for this campaign, as she has clearly done.

But I think Kevin is absolutely right. There is absolutely no way that the slightest hint of race-baiting could help Clinton in the primary. She needed the black and civil rights communities to win, and they (we) would be sensitive to anything that sounded racist. The Clintons were well aware of this. So were Obama and Axlerod.

I can never remember whether HTML works here, but.

Obama Camp's Memo on Clintons' Politicizing Race
Sam Stein, Huffington Post, 12 January

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/12/obama-camps-memo-on-clin_n_81205.html
Memo.

The story says something like this:

In January, it was revealed that a memo was put out by the Obama campaign highlighting alleged racist statements by the Clinton campaign.

The memo (falsely) claimed that Bill Clinton had dismissed the idea of Obama's candidacy as a "fairy tale" and that Andrew Cuomo had suggested Obama was "shucking and jiving". These claims were manifestly untrue.

It also claimed that a reference to Obama's admitted youthful drug use was playing on racist stereotypes. Bill Clinton's remarks about how he's hung out with Mandela himself but he'd trust Hillary to put her life on the line, and Hillary's comments about how MLK's work could not be completed until LBJ signed on the dotted line, were also suggested to be part of a pattern of racism.

(Bollocks.)

I personally have also been informed, repeatedly and with vigor, that the mere mention of Jesse Jackson thereby brands Obama as "the Black Candidate" (because gods forbid we should let people think that Obama has anything to do with a man who was once an effective voice for people of all colors before the Republicans demolished him and turned him into the bogeyman), despite the fact that one of his vocal supporters is Jesse Jackson, Jr.

I note that one of the commenters to that post points out that Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. said, right after the NH primary, that Hillary Clinton failed to display sufficient emotion about Katrina, despite the fact that there was no example of Obama having done so, either.

I will also add that it's obvious from the video that Hillary Clinton, as politely as possible, made clear in the "Muslim" interview that she regarded the question as idiotic and baseless. I'm sorry if Obama supporters were outraged that she didn't go so far as to campaign for him, but I don't see why saying, "as far as I know," was such a big deal. She made it obvious that it was stupid to ask her since there was nothing additional she could know. Sure, if it was me, I'd have been all over it in no uncertain terms, but there's a reason I'm not in politics - no politician can openly call a high-profile member of the "mainstream" broadcast media a racist moron and expect to continue their career.

This doesn't mean I want Hillary to win the nomination - in fact, I think she's now been fatally wounded, not least by these charges of racism which have destroyed her support in the black community. But sending out that memo was definitely a slash-and-burn tactic, harmful not just to a potential Clinton presidential candidacy, but to the party as a whole and to racial harmony in America.

I think Ferraro was an idiot for opening her mouth, but I can understand her bitterness at the continued suggestion that white women who don't support Obama are just racists.

I had expected to be supporting Obama, but in the end I liked Edwards because I liked the things he said and was put off by Obama dissing Paul Wellstone, putting Social Security back in play, and his continual style of Sister Sold-ya-out statements toward progressives. The Harry and Louise ad didn't make me change my mind.

But I already didn't like Hillary, so I'm just gritting my teeth waiting to find out which one of these two jerks I have to vote for in the general election. (And anyone who cares about our country does have to vote for whoever it is - this isn't about you and your personal feelings.)

Now just cut this crap out.

Clinton would give McCain much more of a fight then Obama will. McCain will take 40-45 states against Obama.

Wrong, of course; Obama takes more states and gets more electoral votes, beating McCain by a wider margin. But getting people who don't know any better to repeat this fiction is the most effective thing Mark Penn has done in this campaign. So I guess that'll be his legacy.

Put another way, Daryl, I don't think Clinton is focusing on how she can win the nomination. I think--and everything her campaign has done has supported this--she's too busy focusing on how Obama can lose it.

If by it you mean the nomination, welcome to "front runner status."

If by it you mean the nomination, welcome to "front runner status."

Sure, and that's fine. My comment was addressing the point that she's not looking at the long-term right now (or at any point during this campaign, even when she was the front runner); she's operating moment by moment and missing the big picture.

Client #11: Barack's whole campaign has been about removing the slightest hint of being the black candidate.

From a New York Times magazine profile of David Axelrod, Obama's media strategist, April 1, 2007:

"With Obama’s candidacy, Axelrod is placing a gaudy bet: that the symbolic significance of race has now begun to flip. An underlying message of the campaign is that African-American candidates can symbolically represent the future.

"I asked him if he thought that Obama’s race would be a detriment. 'I don’t think of it as a detriment,' Axelrod said. 'I know that there are people who wouldn’t vote for a black candidate, but I don’t know if they would vote for a Democratic candidate anyway. But I think that in a sense Barack is the personification of his own message for this country, that we get past the things that divide us and focus on the things that unite us. He is his own vision.'”

http://tinyurl.com/2gzyjv

She made it obvious that it was stupid to ask her since there was nothing additional she could know.

Bingo.

Patrick at 11:33 AM:
" There are a great many Americans like Ferraro who bristle at the notion that anyone could accuse them of being "racist," and remain only dimly aware that many of the well-meaning, paternalistic attitudes that seemed so liberal and progressive in 1965 have been hopelessly compromised..."

Bingo.

But if those attitudes were always paternalistic (despite being well-intentioned) does it matter if they have since become "compromised" ?

Isn't the lack of comprehension of that fact clearly and honestly the root of the problem now?

Shorter version of Ferraro et al: "What else do you people want?"

Um,... maybe the answer is that people--all people--truly desire equality based on a true belief in the rightness of it flowing out of natural law within our society and not because some powerful person (or other person with a nexus to real power, say, an ex-VP candidate or Hootie Johnson at the Augusta National) decides "Oh alright already if it will shut you people up!"

Maybe folks are bone weary tired of being treated as children when it suits the powers-that-be but held fully accountable as adults when not convenient?

Sorry for the slightly OT question, but I'm busy trying to determine the, um, pecuniary benefits associated with pursuing membership in a certain, well, 'population group' that operates a string of casinos.

If a guy with a white mom and a black dad is considered 'black,' is there some standard percentile-based threshold beyond which I would not be considered 'red'? Or is it variable?

I don't know who is doing what, but it seems pretty clear that race and accusations of racism have helped Obama so far. One poll exit number that stood out to me was (I think) from SC that about 20% of the people who voted for Obama thought that Clinton would be a better president. Only 3% of the people who voted for Clinton thought that Obama would be a better president.

Race may hurt Obama in the general election, but in a Democratic primary its a different story. It was after the SC primary and the accusations of racism that Obama's string of wins started.

First of all, it was shown pretty conclusively on a post at DU that kos linked to that Obama's image was darkened.

Since there are still people apparently invested in believing this, they need to read Cannonfire's explanation of what happens to video when it's compressed to upload to YouTube.

Short version: the compression algorithm darkens and widens EVERYTHING. The ad as hosted on YouTube is significantly different from the ad as aired on TV. Even the version on the Clinton site is hosted on YouTube.

Making the Clinton campaign responsible for the fact that a third-party compression algorithm darkens and widens video that another third party POSTS to the internet is the kind of hysteria that no longer surprises me, alas.

I maintained back in January that it was not the Clinton campaign that was primarily responsible for race baiting but the Obama campaign (with a complicit media who also were willing to fan those flames for their own reasons, not least being the blatant anti-Clinton hostility many of the inside the beltway media have), in particular the way they cast the MLK/LBJ comment, the way they took the WJC "Fairy Tale" comment way out of context to claim it was about the entire campaign when it clearly wasn't, the JJ jr comment after the NH loss about where HRC's tears for Katrina were and the claim that it was the Bradley effect that was behind the loss in NH despite the fact that said explanation had no basis in fact since Obama got what he was polling at, it was HRC that received more votes than polling indicated she would.

That I saw it being the Obama campaign (not him directly but his campaign staff and the surrogates, an important distinction especially since the Obama defenders constantly claimed he was doing no such thing while ignoring the behaviour of the surrogates/campaign/supporters) that first made an organized concerted attempt to inject race into the nomination fight, and that it was being done to strip away her support in the AA community heading into SC to pile up a big victory to counter her win in NH, and that it would also if it caught on strip away other support because who wants to be associated with race baiters in the Democratic party? For this I have been dismissed, mocked, and told I understand nothing about American politics.

Well too bad, but I still stand by this. While I am in agreement that there was the odd HRC supporter/surrogate that made what could be reasonably seen as racially insensitive to race baiting comments (shuck and jive for example was something I always thought crossed that line as I said here back in January) that the first campaign wide organized effort to use race was the Obama campaign, and nothing I have seen since has given me any reason to change that opinion. I kept getting told that it was not to his advantage to use race, yet how much of his lead is built upon the near total lock he has had on AA votes over the past couple of months? Yes, he would still be a viable competitor for the nomination, but would he be as far ahead or even ahead at all if say he was getting 70% instead of near 90% levels with the rest going to HRC? It also had the advantage of playing on the white guilt that is clearly in America, especially within the white community that is in the Democratic Party base and further reducing HRC's support in that community as well as consolidating his support with that segment of the vote. So there was always a reason for his campaign to do so, and the candidate is ultimately responsible for the actions of his/her campaign, a standard everyone is willing to apply to HRC but far less so to Obama, at least until very recently.

There was also the willingness of many to take the guilty until proven innocent approach on the motives of any Clinton worker/supporter/surrogate while always giving Obama's side the benefit of the doubt for the longest time. I noted that as well was helping him to pull this approach of taking the high road himself while his campaign racialized the Dem electorate against Clinton, indeed I called it a Rovian strategy because until this race no one ever accused either Clinton of being racially insensitive to racists, indeed one of their greatest strengths was that they were seen as being very positive towards AAs and AA issues, and that was turned into the main weakness by which she and her candidacy has been attacked, which is the definition of Rovian politics. To take the core strength of a candidate and turn it into the weakness by which you defeat them, as was done to Kerry with his honourable service history when running against Bush's "War President" which that record was expected to neutralize as an advantage but instead thanks to the SBVfT became his downfall. Time and time again she has been held responsible/behind any comment that has been cast as racially insensitive by any supporter (not just official surrogates but anyone that the Obama side sees as supporting her) while Obama has not been held to that standard, not even close.

Oh yes, I would add that I expect there has been GOP “ratfucking” involved as well, they are clearly more afraid of HRC than Obama despite all they have claimed they would prefer to fight against her from all I’ve observed, because she will fight with every breath she takes while his message of “bipartisanship” and a “new way of politics without the hostility” leaves him far less able to fight back without undercutting his main message and premise for his candidacy which leaves him far weaker in terms of being able to respond to their attacks, especially the ones from the supposedly independent groups that support the GOP in these elections.

I have said time and again the Obama campaign is not practicing what the candidate has been preaching, I just hope that enough people realize this before giving him the nomination, because I do think it will be the best way for the GOP to win with McCain to have Obama as the candidate especially after using these tactics against HRC. I know this is not a popular view here, and I stayed quiet much of the last few weeks because quite frankly I was finding the level of contempt I was getting and the personal attacks by some stressful enough to aggravate my current cardiac problems. So I stopped commenting, but I still kept reading here, and since the past few weeks have been reasonably stable for me I am chancing returning to the odd commenting here. I am not however inclined to get into fights with people because of the stress, so if you dislike/.disagree with me and comment on it I will read it but I doubt I will be responding very much to it, especially if the tone is overly aggressive and/or personal.

I'm going to add that all this "where there's smoke there's fire" logic is ridiculous. If you read the entire interview, you would know how absurd it is to even imagine that Bill Clinton was "dog-whistling" on race with his Jesse Jackson analogy. I no more blame Hillary for what Ferraro said, or really even for her "as far as I know" slip when her whole point (if you read the entire sequence) was how ridiculous rumors like that about both of them are, than I do Obama for what the pastor of his church said or what some mind-reading OpEd columnist in the Times said. The people here on both sides speculating over this with less than zero actual evidence, almost always with snippets, sometimes hearsay snippets, without actually reading the entire context from which the offending words were pulled, and always having utterly no knowledge where among the extended masses of a candidates supporters it is actually coming from are being very, very absurd. All of you, including Kevin, need to step back, tape a deep breath, and stop flying off the handle without any knowledge of what you are talking about.

Cindy on March 14, 2008 at 12:45 PM:

It was after the SC primary and the accusations of racism that Obama's string of wins started.

That doesn't explain Iowa, Cindy, unless you want to get pedantic on the idea of a 'string of wins'.

Thanks, steveconga. I have seen the transcript. In fact, my point was that the first "categorical denial" has problems of its own. It starts strong, and then she waters it down.

KROFT: You don't believe that Senator Obama is a Muslim? CLINTON: Of course not. I mean, that's -- you know, there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that.

"I take him on the basis of what he says." It's the kind of defense Al Gore gave of Bill when he was first accused of the affair with Monica. "Well, I believe him," is noticeably weak as supporting evidence.

If I were to ask, "Do you believe Kevin is a communist?" would you say, "well, I've asked Kevin and he says he's not." I doubt it, because it legitimizes the question. There's no reason to even ask him. There's no need to say, "well we have his word that he isn't." Instead, I'd say, "there's no reason to even ask him."

Her very first answer contains a strong response ("baseless") and a much weaker response (equivalent to, "because he said so"). It is not unreasonable for Kroft to try to tease out where on that spectrum she is. He eventually offers her the word, "scurrilous." In the meantime, she manages to legitimize the question, again, with the "as far as I know" garbage.

Her very first answer contains a strong response ("baseless") and a much weaker response (equivalent to, "because he said so"). It is not unreasonable for Kroft to try to tease out where on that spectrum she is. He eventually offers her the word, "scurrilous." In the meantime, she manages to legitimize the question, again, with the "as far as I know" garbage.

Oh please - he 'offered' her the degree of outrage he thought was appropriate? Did anyone think to ask Kroft why he thinks it's 'scurrilous' to be Muslim?

Clinton's only missed opportunity was not saying, "Why are you hounding me on this, Steve? Who's been telling you I DO think he's a Muslim?"

Dagome:

As a Muslim myself, I would have preferred that Clinton point out that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim. The fact that she pivoted at the end to turn attention to the fact that she is the one who has been attacked more was typical of a politician. But nothing she said in that interview was meant to leave the question of whether or not Obama is a Muslim up in the air.

These posts are trademark Kevin Drum OTOH-OTOH bickerfest baiting. Maddeningly obtuse. Seemingly even-handed. They set off conflagrations.

I'll take just one graf from his post, this one:

Again, I don't know. Maybe Hillary's campaign really is behind all this stuff. Maybe they really are that stupid. But all the people who "know" Hillary is responsible sound an awful lot like all the people who "knew" Hillary had murdered Vince Foster back in the 90s. One way or another, I sure feel like I'm being played. I'm just not sure by whom.

Let me begin by conceding that as a privileged white woman I'm no expert on race. Having reared an ethnically Asian daughter (adopted at birth while we were abroad), I nevertheless have some experience with white reactions to race in America.

This leads me to Jennifer's second point, upthread, which I think gets one part of this discussion just right:

(2) . . . as a white person, I try very hard not to tell black people what they are and are not allowed to think is offensive. I don't see anything racially charged about the 3am ad - if I were an older black man, might I view the ad differently? Sure. Might there be a dynamic with the LBJ/MLK thing than I'm just not getting? Sure.

The logical flaw that runs through all of Kevin's reasoning on the race-baiting issue (Salon's Joan Walsh on MSNBC did this too, with her reasonalbe-woman protest: "I just don't see it!"), in other words, is that Kevin sets the reasonable-man standard. If he doesn't see it (race-baiting), well then, it's elementary, my dear Watson, it doesn't exist!

What was the event the other night, Hillary in that long red jacket, speaking to a gathering of African-American newspaper people?

Did you see the clip of an older woman standing with the mike in her hand, asking Hillary to "stop it" in a voice that you know was unaccustomed to quavering with anger. That woman, not Kevin Drum, is the expert on race baiting. I defer to her.

Finally, Kevin states that there's nothing in Hillary's past to suggest she'd stoop to tactics like this. Worse, he writes that those who suggest it or believe it possible sound "an awful lot like" the she-killed-Vince-Foster crowd. Just. Wow.

Joe Klein, IIRC, documented just this campaign behavior in Primary Colors. That's a clip from the movie.

Lucky for Mark Penn, the 2008 Clinton campaign is running against a superior biracial rival who a year ago wasn't black enough--back when the Clintons's had the black vote in their vest pockets. So Penn doesn't have to dig up dirt and hand it to the Wall Street Journal. All he has to do is suggest that this once not-black-enough candidate is now black. All Penn has to do then is sit back and enjoy watching reasonable white bloggers wring their hands over the ensuing conflagration and deplore the, um, bickering.

Worse, he writes that those who suggest it or believe it possible sound "an awful lot like" the she-killed-Vince-Foster crowd. Just. Wow.

It's possible you are unaware of this, but on many of the Obama-centric sites, Whitewater is resurfacing as a reason to distrust Clinton. One of the commenters brought up Vince Foster as a reason to fear Hillary.

I know many of Obama's new supporters were in grade school in the nineties and not paying attention to the right-wing-fueled witch-hunt taking place in our country, but I find their use of disproved GOP memes offensive. It also makes me question their judgment and reason.

shortstop has it absolutelty correct vis a vis Darryl McCollough. Mrs. Clinton is trying to win the DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION. She is trying to beat Barrack Obama for the Democratic nomination.

That her tactics in doing so, if proven successful, will profoundly damage her general election chances against John McCain is irrelevant to the discussion of current events.

Though I started to believe a few weeks ago that Mr. Obama would be the next president, I am no longer nearly as sanguine. Obama was in much better shape early on when blacks were still wavering between he and Hillary. Now that the black vote is going overwhelmingly to Obama, you are seeing a significant backlash from whites.

Thus, Obama is now the official Black Candidate. "The Black Candidate" is going to have a very hard time winning the general election. As there are far more whites than blacks in this country, it is clear that the Obama's overwhelming support amongst blacks is HURTING his support among whites, and that this cycle is self-fulfilling.

Its hard, neh impossible, to believe that this was not a conscious part of the Clinton campaign's strategy. The worst news for Obama was when it started looking like almost all blacks supported him and almost all whites supported Hillary.

*

Kevin -- I wish you would talk more about Samantha Powers. I really feel like Obama is gaming the situation with that one. Everyone assumes that Powers was fired because of the "monster" comment and blames Hillary for it.

I think the "monster" things was the LEAST obnoxious thing Powers said and has effectively masked the real problem. She said that people in Ohio were "obsessed" over jobs. Lovely. That smacks of an ivory tower elitism that the Clinton campaign could have made hay with. Then she goes on BBC the same week as the Goolsbee/Nafta debacle and says, "Obama is just kidding about taking troops out of Iraq, he's just saying that to win an election."

I have ZERO sympathy for her elitist ass being canned.

Arachnae,

I can't possible keep track of all the online nonsense. I can't even keep track of Kevin's.

"Obama is just kidding about taking troops out of Iraq, he's just saying that to win an election."

Is that you quoting Power or quoting yourself?

It's possible you are unaware of this, but on many of the Obama-centric sites, Whitewater is resurfacing as a reason to distrust Clinton. One of the commenters brought up Vince Foster as a reason to fear Hillary.

You might want to provide a link Arachnae.

Who's for talking about Eliot Spitzer's willie?

Is Hillary herself race baiting? No. But her campaign and high level surrogates sure are, and have been, for over a month now. I've seen very little gender baiting from the Obama camp (not to equate those two thing). Hillary's run a dirty grasping campaign rather than a well thought out strategic one and despite all the experience she claims, she's lost.

I beg to differ with Jason Zengerle assessment that Obama had nothing to gain from using race as a strategy. All that needs to be done is look at the southern primaries whose AA representation as a percentage of Democratic voters is fairly substantial. So I don't buy the Obama had nothing to gain argument, that's provably false on it's face. Now if you wish to argue that Obama didn't participate in fanning racial tension that's fair, but don't give this "there was nothing for him to gain" silliness.

Just a refresher. Remember when Obama wasn't black enough?

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&resnum=0&q=obama+black+enough&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv

Kevin, it's insulting and patronizing (and I would have thought beneath you) to conflate these two groups:

Maybe Hillary's campaign really is behind all this stuff. Maybe they really are that stupid. But all the people who "know" Hillary is responsible sound an awful lot like all the people who "knew" Hillary had murdered Vince Foster back in the 90s.

For starters, Ferraro WAS A MEMBER OF HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN STAFF! So, how on god's green earth can anyone deny that race baiting comments have come directly from the Hillary campaign? It wasn't just a one-off mistake by Ferraro - Ferraro has been making these comments for some time (you know, narrowcasting).

Nor was the Hillary camp quick to distance themselves from her comments immediately. Quite the contrary. First, Ferraro ratcheted up the attacks in following interviews. Second, Margaret Williams, Hillary's campaign manager accused Obama of being racist for daring to, you know, have any objection to comments that said the ONLY REASON Obama was where he was, was because of his skin color.

But you know what, if you want to make the patently absurd and condescending comparison of people who criticize the Clinton campaign for making racially charged comments to the Vince Foster murder conspiracy nuts, then let me just remind you that Hillary's campaign manager, Margaret ("Maggie") Williams was the one who removed files from Vince Foster's office immediately after his death and before investigators could see them. There, we've completed the circle of sleaze, lies, racism, and scandal that is the Hillary campaign.

Is this talk of racism what we would have to look forward to for four years of an Obama presidency?

Is the practice of calling other Democrats (not to mention Republicans) racist something we really want to hear from our Dem leaders?

The Republicans began over a year ago, perhaps 3 or 4 years back, saying Democrats were racists. How is it that now this question of whether some Democrats are racist is integral to this presidential fight?

I may worry that a Clinton presidency would be Republican Lite, but I dread the worse possibility that an Obama presidency would turn out to be a disaster in terms of NOT being Progressive and of being a continuous string of efforts to 'work with the Republicans' (triangulation on a scale even Hillary wouldn't imagine) and a continuous hate fest.

We've got to sort this out quick. We've got to get our act together and behave like Democrats who have morality and scruples. All this finger-pointing declaring the opponent to be evil while trying to (appear to) be above the fray isn't helping.

Arachnae, the blog you refrence (fair: "OBAMA PLAYS THE RACE CARD" and balanced: "Hillary---Why do I now support her? Because of the smear campaign against her. They wouldn't lie about her if she weren't doing something right!" [prominant graphics on the site]) fails to note that in other Hillary attack ads against Obama his image ISN'T darkened.

None of Clinton's defenders are even touching the timeline. Why do these supposed misstatements always come during politically convienent times? The people who spend the rest of teh week lauding the Clintons for their ruthlessness now claim to be shocked, shocked to find race baiting going on here.

"there's nothing in Hillary's past to make me think she'd do this." - Kevin

Nothing in her past, except her husband's own statements and previous campaign stunts.

I'll say again, no one except Kevin is allowed to criticize Clinton.

Arachnae on March 14, 2008 at 1:35 PM:

..but on many of the Obama-centric sites, Whitewater is resurfacing as a reason to distrust Clinton.

Links, people, links! Since we don't appear to be trusting each other's motivations while commenting, we need to provide evidence...

Teresa on March 14, 2008 at 1:43 PM:

She said that people in Ohio were "obsessed" over jobs. Lovely.

And true, Teresa. Clinton's attack on Obama regarding NAFTA and the Canadian government raised enough fear in that state over jobs to cost him that primary.

That smacks of an ivory tower elitism that the Clinton campaign could have made hay with.

Nah; tough to go the 'elitism' route when your candidate graduated from Wellesley and Yale. Then again, I'm sure that Hillary is just a regular person, someone you could go to the bar and sip Appletinis with...

Then she goes on BBC the same week as the Goolsbee/Nafta debacle and says, "Obama is just kidding about taking troops out of Iraq, he's just saying that to win an election."

You'd have a point, Teresa, if Powers actually said that. Here's the actual quote:

"He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator," she said at one point in the interview.

Power downplayed Obama's commitment to quick withdrawal from Iraq on Hard Talk, a program that often exceeds any of the U.S. talk shows in the rigor of its grillings. She was challenged on Obama's Iraq plan, as it appears on his website, which says that Obama "will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months."

"What he’s actually said, after meting with the generals and meeting with intelligence professionals, is that you – at best case scenario – will be able to withdraw one to two combat brigades each month. That’s what they’re telling him. He will revisit it when he becomes president," Power says.

The host, Stephen Sackur, challenged her:"So what the American public thinks is a commitment to get combat forces out in 16 months isn't a commitment isn't it?"

"You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009," she said. "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan – an operational plan – that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think – it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, 'Well, I said it, therefore I’m going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.'"

"It’s a best-case scenario," she said again.

Note that neither Clinton or Obama have promised a firm timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Both camps have said similar things regarding troop withdrawal from Iraq. Personally, I'd like to see a firm timeline for withdrawal, but both Dem candidates are letting the circumstances dictate the specifics.

I have ZERO sympathy for her elitist ass being canned.

She resigned, Teresa. Same as another 'elitist ass' (your definition, not mine), Geraldine Ferraro.

MarkH: Is this talk of racism what we would have to look forward to for four years of an Obama presidency?

No, this is the kind of sleazy, dishonest, divisive and immoral attacks that would become the hallmarks of a Clinton presidency.

Augustus, you aren't seriously trying to argue that Ferraro's comments demonstrate proof that those early statements, including Hillary's tearing up, were in fact purposefully racially charged? Isn't this called arguing after the fact?

MarkH,

This "talk of racism" is exactly the sort of thing that will subside once Hillary concedes that she's lost her bid for the nomination. I expect this to take place in June.

After that, all you have are the fearful haters at the margins.

I myself admire the circumspection Obama has shown to date in this highly charged atmosphere. I trust he'll know what to do in the General.

Links, people, links!

Sorry, guys, but you're going to have to wade thru any of the 200-300+ comment Hillary-Hating threads on Americablog. I didn't think to bookmark each instance.

Here's a link: R. J. Eskow, "Holding Up a Mirror. . ."

An excerpt:

Of course, you can't condemn an entire campaign ... or its supporters ... based on the hate-filled fanatics in its midst. But the ability of otherwise reasonable Clinton supporters to tolerate and explain away inexcusable behavior is disturbing at best. Their best defense seems to be that all these racial innuendos are absolutely innocent episodes on the part of Clinton and her supporters. They usually garnish this defense with the argument that these innocent mistakes are then cleverly exploited and inflamed by that slick, shifty, overly clever Obama and his supporters.

So, let's see: Although they're the most sophisticated political couple in America - which is why you should vote for her - they and the team they've assembled keep making the same blunder over and over. Meanwhile their opponent's team is so much shrewder, tougher, smarter, and faster that they successfully use it against them again and again. And that's how supporters defend Clinton on the race issue.

Is that what "thirty-five years of experience" gets you?

For what it's worth, I don't believe it. Nor do I believe - even for a second - that Clinton or her core team are racist. But they're smart, and they're shrewd, and they know very well how to manipulate "microtrends" - including the racist "microtrend."

And, for all the outrage, it will work in Pennsylvania. I know that, not just from sociological study, but from having grown up in an ethnic enclave in upstate New York. The demographics of Utica are very much like those in some parts of Pennsylvania - Italian, Polish, Irish, as well as outliers like us - and I remember the outrage against affirmative action. Take Mrs. F, who said something like this to me when I was a teenager:

"Youse kids are going to have it tough, Ricky. These coloreds is coming up, and they wanna be the first in line. They don't want to work hard like we did, Ricky. Mark my words: Youse are gonna apply for jobs and the coloreds will get 'em first."

Geraldine Ferraro knows these people, too. What she was saying was that this black guy Obama is no different from that mythical "black guy" who took your cousin's job down at the plant. (Because, God forbid, we don't want voters to be reminded that NAFTA took those jobs - with President Clinton's support.)

Playing to those resentments will work in Pennsylvania. Make no mistake: The Geraldine Ferraro "fiasco" is a big win for Hillary Clinton. It will add to her margin on April 22.

And she'll concede in June. But there's much more in his long, well-argued piece.

Arachnae on March 14, 2008 at 3:20 PM:

I didn't think to bookmark each instance.

No need to...however, when you state, "but on many of the Obama-centric sites", it's nice to know how you are defining 'many'. You've provided one, and referred to its comments section. Thanks!

I guess I'll help you out: Just about every leftie blog that has a comment section probably contains references to Whitewater, either provided as a reason to distrust Clinton or just as old crap that will be stirred up by the right-whingers should Clinton capture the Dem nomination...even this one, where Kev goes out of his way to be Switzerland.

Anyway, pretending that this is happening only on 'Obama-centric' sites is silly and prejudicial, Arachne. You're better than that.

Anyway, pretending that this is happening only on 'Obama-centric' sites is silly and prejudicial,

Is it your contention that this is only coming from right-wing ringers trolling progressive blogs? Because I recognize many of the names of the posters on Americablog, and if they are right-wing plants, they've been sleepers for a long time.

it's nice to know how you are defining 'many'. You've provided one, and referred to its comments section

I thought DailyKOS when without saying.

um... 'went without saying'...

Who's for talking about Eliot Spitzer's willie?

Posted by: shortstop on March 14, 2008 at 2:08 PM

Well that would be an interesting change of topic, but I have a better idea.

I want Augustus to explain to me why some of the sermons that Obama's pastor has dished out should not be interpreted as being racist from a white person's point of view. I would also like Augustus to explain how Obama, while disagreeing with his pastor's stance on several issues, continued to attend his services for 20 years?

Kevin throws red meat into the pot. Here I throw in my red meat to up the ante.

optical,

Red meat is for tossing out to the ravening hordes raw, bloody, unseasoned. Don't for a second consider throwing it into a pot.

I'm not a churchgoer, but I grew up in a churchgoing family and I know from experience that attending a church, even for years, isn't an automatic endorsement of the minister. At my parents' church, there was a minister that a lot of people vehemently disagreed with -- he was a (shudder) liberal -- but they kept going because they liked the guy personally, and anyway the congregation was more important to them than the minister.

Maybe for Obama it was the same thing. One can agree or disagree with him, but to connect him with a preacher's sermons might not be fair.

sj wrote: Now, there's an impartial observer without an ax to grind who's never been known to make statements from the perspective of a detached pundit while secretly working on behalf of a candidate. Were you guys born yesterday?

How about Rolling Stone magazine, which also referred to Clinton as the new Nixon?

Is RS a newbie? How about Mo Dowd, who forecasted the only thing Hillary would have ready on Day One was her Enemies List.

Notice a trend here? Is there anything that Billary could do that would put you off her, or are all you Lieberman Democrats so ready to swallow, that you'll take anything shoved down your throats.

Reasonable people have a gag reflex. Clintonistas have none.

Just listening to the insane Clintonista response to the spot-on Keith Olbermann commentary on the Clinton campaign is to make one wonder if you have more in common with the faith-based Bushevik cultists or the Jonestown Kool-Aid brigade.

Either way, born without a gag reflex.

Hillary is done. The only thing remaining is to see how much damage she can do to the Party before she sleeps. The thought makes true progressives gag, but there I go being redundant.

Have to agree with paxr55 on the red meat. I don't think you were trying to bring up images of Shabu Shabu... But maybe you were. Geez I'm hungry, shithead.

Thersites,
I will allow that many people attend their church based on familiarity. Take my mother who at 85 is not going to change congregations solely because the new minister raves lunatic about the evils of being gay, even though she disagrees.

However, if one is planning on hitting the national stage in politics, one would think that Obama might have thought twice about that, considering that he initially was representing himself as the post racial candidate.

I feel sorry for Obama actually. First there were questions about him being not black enough. Now there will be questions about him being too black.

Course Hillary gets the same shit. She is either a frigid lesbian who has only stayed with Bill so she can advance her agenda, or she is some female wuss who puts up with Bill's abusive behavior regarding his, ahem, dalliances.

Don'cha wish we could go back and talk about the issues. And move beyond the Iraq war, universal health car and NAFTA, and talk about other substantive things, such as approach to scientific research funding, energy, etc. I think this would allow people to see the candidates in toto and not in these idiotic sound bites that get overhyped by both sides in the blogosphere.

Arachnae on March 14, 2008 at 3:50 PM:

Is it your contention that this is only coming from right-wing ringers trolling progressive blogs?

The thought didn't cross my mind, Arachne, nor was it reflected in anything I wrote. I can imagine that a very small portion commentors are right-wing trolls like mhr trying to stir things up or push an idea, but they prolly aren't the bulk of the commentors.

Anyway, I guess you missed the part in the prior comment reading, "Just about every leftie blog that has a comment section probably contains references to Whitewater," which was intended to counter your statement that the phenomenon of Whitewater comment sightings wasn't limited exclusively to 'Obama-centric sites'...Stating otherwise is what makes it silly and predjudicial.

I thought DailyKOS went without saying.

No idea. I read dKos on, like, a once-a-month basis, if that.

optical weenie on March 14, 2008 at 3:58 PM:

Here I throw in my red meat..

*Does bestest Groucho Marx impersonation*

Have you seen a doctor about that?

Grape - Tho I be a weenie, I lack that particular body part. So I'm not as sensitive to what may have caused shudders among the male bloggers here.
I apologize to all you guys sincerely if I made you involuntarily cross your legs in reflex to my post.

Weenie,
You're right about the shit that both Obama and Clinton get. They can't win. That's exactly what I mean when I say we're not mature enough yet to have this "historical" election season, and that's a shame.
There are real issues that need to be discussed, and they're getting lost in the noise. Of course if we didn't have the race/gender stuff to fight about I'm sure our MSM would be glad to provide other distractions, but they might be less toxic.

Thersites,
We Dems sometimes do a good job shooting ourselves in the foot. But at some point this nation has to have a national discourse on race and gender. See the results of an election. Go back to another national discourse on race and gender, do some fixin, have an election. See the results of the election. Go back and have another discourse, etc., etc., etc.

Maybe this will all be behind all of us - Dem and Reb in oh, say 200 more years?

Maybe this will all be behind all of us - Dem and Reb in oh, say 200 more years?

Now that was a funny malapropism.

optical weenie on March 14, 2008 at 4:37 PM:

I apologize to all you guys sincerely if I made you involuntarily cross your legs in reflex to my post..

Not necessary; I'm just trying to make some light-hearted funnin' about diseased genitalia.

*Winces in advance of anticipated lecture regarding VD*

Sorry, I meant to type Dem and Rep.

Grape - can't help you there, something I never touch!

When I think of read meat, I think of how much is at steak in this election.

But grape_crush: I got some pills for you.

read> meat = red meat!
Crap. Ruined my own pun.

Hey, it's been half an hour since anyone was abused on this thread! Longer than that if you discount enozinho's ritual invocation of "shithead." Let's pick it up, people!

Okay Thersites - YOU ARE A POOPY HEAD!

grape_crush,

These days, "VD" is out...it's STI (sexually transmitted infection).

Also, for those of you following the details of the Spitzer scandal...it's "sex work," not "prostitution." Or, more accurately, it's "commercial sex work."

Just a friendly update from a person working in the field...not the sex work field, mind you, although at my age it does involve quite a lot of work.

Radix: Augustus, you aren't seriously trying to argue that Ferraro's comments demonstrate proof that those early statements, including Hillary's tearing up, were in fact purposefully racially charged? Isn't this called arguing after the fact?

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're referencing (I made no reference to Hillary tearing up). I'm simply stating the obvious: the fact that Ferraro (a member of Hillary's campaign team) made very similar statements about Obama's race show that her comments weren't an accident. That is also evident by her response in follow up interviews where she not only defended her comments but turned around and accused people of discriminating against her because she was white.

The fact that Hillary's campaign manager responded by defending Ferraro and going on the counter-offensive, accusing Obama of racism for their criticism of Ferraro's comments.

"commercial sex work."

Which implies the existence of "pro bono" sex work. But I don't think we want to go there.

Ed: "Donald: To hold Obama responsible for the statements of persons, e.g. J. Wright, not part of his campaign crosses into the realm of irrational."

Right.

After all, Rev. Wright is only serving on one of the Obama campaign committees, albeit and admittedly mostly for show, like an honorary chair to a fundraising campaign. He only gave the invocation at Sen. Obama's announcement of his candidacy. Obama only based the title of his book The Audacity of Hope on the reverend's sermons.

And for the past 15-20 years, the Obama family chose to attend the Rev. Wright's church for the comic relief, because after all, the good reverend is truly a wild and crazy guy, and you just never know what wacky thing he'll say next.

Oh, please.

One of the things that really attracted me to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 campaign was his message about taking personal responsibility for the choices one makes in this lifetime. I've long since concluded that Jackson's message is a novel concept to Barack Obama that takes a back seat to his political ambitions, especially as it relates to his voluntary interaction with characters like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Antoin "Tony" Rezko.

These repeated claims of plausible deniability in the face of evidence to the contrary, this long-standing act where Sen. Obama plays Sgt. Schultz to these clowns' Col. Hogan, is wearing awfully thin. It could well come back to haunt all Democrats in the fall, should the media finally remove the stars over their eyes and turn the bright spotlight on his past associations and political relationships as we commence final approach the general election.

And people like you just facilitate that behavior with your repeated excuses for him. In the process you've become, more often than not, your own best parody.

At this point, if -- hypothetically, of couse -- Sen. Obama was somehow ever caught on videocamera pilfering the collection plates at Sunday services, probably half of you would claim that he was merely making change, while the other half would applaud his attendance at church.

Well, it's now political prime time. I don't like unpleasant surprises in my politics, especially when it happens with my own party (see Spitzer, Eliot). That's why it's so important that we vet our own candidates, and not leave that to the GOP to do it for us in September.

You have been duly and repeatedly warned. You ignore it at our party's peril.

I've got to go to work now. It's St. Patrick's Day weekend, and I work at a place called Murphy's Bar & Grill, so go figure.

Aloha.

Thersites - are you trying to also push your pills to JM so that he can do his share of pro bono work?

Lay off with the pills, Weenie.
Or I'll tell people you supported Inkblot for president because he's, well, whiter.

You are so wrong. Bush didn't do the smear jobs, it was his surrogates. Then he acts like he is above it.

How can someone with a political blog be so naive.

Augustus: "But you know what, if you want to make the patently absurd and condescending comparison of people who criticize the Clinton campaign for making racially charged comments to the Vince Foster murder conspiracy nuts, then let me just remind you that Hillary's campaign manager, Margaret ('Maggie') Williams was the one who removed files from Vince Foster's office immediately after his death and before investigators could see them. There, we've completed the circle of sleaze, lies, racism, and scandal that is the Hillary campaign."

Looks like someone got left behind by the space shuttle as it returned to earth.

Just like I said: Your own best parody.

Or I'll tell people you supported Inkblot for president because he's, well, whiter.

Well, I'm supporting Domino because she's female. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Ta-dah! It's about time.

This particular interview should have taken place months ago! Oh, well -- at least it's a start:

Chicago Tribune | 5:13pm CDT, 14 Mar 08
Obama says Rezko played a bigger fundraising role -- "Indicted Chicago businessman Antoin "Tony" Rezko was a more significant fundraiser for presidential candidate Barack Obama's earlier political campaigns than previously known. Rezko raised as much as $250,000 for the first three offices Obama sought, the senator told the Tribune on Friday. Obama also said for the first time that his private real estate transactions with Rezko involved repeated lapses of judgment. The mistake, Obama said, was not simply that Rezko was under grand jury investigation at the time of their 2005 and 2006 dealings. 'The mistake was he had been a contributor and somebody involved in politics,' he said."

Congratulations, senator, on finally recognizing and stating the obvious. Now, for our party's sake, let's hope there are no more shoes waiting to drop.

Looks like someone got left behind by the space shuttle as it returned to earth. Just like I said: Your own best parody.

I'm not the one who made the absurd comparison between people who are calling the Clinton campaign for making racially charged statements to the Vince Foster murder conspiracy nut-jobs. Kevin did.

But if you're going to play that game to not only dismiss valid criticism but also stigmatize those people as the lunatic fringe, you've got to at least be careful about blowback. Do you really want to bring up Vince Foster? Really? Especially given that a big part of what fueled that scandal was the questions that arose out of Margaret Williams actions (removing files before investigators arrived). She's at the center of both of these uproars.

Apparently that irony escaped you, as you've continued with the same tactic of ridiculing people who dared to point out the irony and absurdity of a link they didn't make.

Leave Donald alone. His arguments are diffused by the fact that is compelled to pepper each post with a reference to Tony Rezko. Here's a tip Donald. Try Barak Hussein Rezko X Esquire as shorthand. Might help.

Love you, shitheads.

enozinho: But nothing she said in that interview was meant to leave the question of whether or not Obama is a Muslim up in the air.

Suppose Hillary wanted to be on record denying the rumor, but secretly wanted to give it just enough air so that it doesn't die. What would she have said?*

In the rest of this thread, many people are questioning Obama's 20 year association with a Christian minister. I suspect Hillary knows of Obama's church attendance.

So, let's try the shoe on the other foot. If somebody asks Obama, "do you think Hillary did anything wrong in Whitewater?" would, "I take her word for it," really be strong enough, at this point? Someone asks, "do you believe Hillary is a lesbian," and he responds with 8 no's and tacks on a "that I'm aware of," you're not going to wonder what is the "that I'm aware of" doing there?

* - Maybe that's an question that cannot be answered. Maybe even Senator "there's a difference between reject and denounce" doesn't deserve to have her words so closely parsed. But it does not seem insane to wonder.

As a Muslim myself, I would have preferred that Clinton point out that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim.

That would have been nice. It'd be nice if atheists were more electable, too. Sadly, I don't think all the walls are going to come tumbling down at once.

.... Do you really want to bring up Vince Foster? Really?....Augustus at 7:34 PM

Speaking of irony, here is Dickie Morris, who you once quoted talking about your Obama. Live by the smear&lie, die by the smear&lie. Apparently there is little difference between Republican and Obama supporters when it comes to mud throwing.

....each post with a reference to Tony Rezko....Love you, shitheads. enozinho at 7:46 PM

enozinho: "Leave Donald alone. His arguments are diffused by the fact that is compelled to pepper each post with a reference to Tony Rezko."

Make light if you want to, shithead, but I'm eventually going to have the last laugh here, even if it's a rueful one. I told everyone here many months ago, before most of you ever heard the name "Tony Rezko", that this guy had the potential to become a major headache not just for Sen. Obama, but for Chicago Democrats in general. And excuse me for tooting my own horn here, but I was spot-on in my assessment.

And please don't make yourself look stupid by trying to tell me that there's nothing to all this. Because if that was truly the case, Obama would never have felt compelled to sit down with reporters and attempt to diffuse the issue by trying to clarify his own tangential role in what's become clearly burgeoning political scandal in Illinois.

"But if you're going to play that game to not only dismiss valid criticism but also stigmatize those people as the lunatic fringe, you've got to at least be careful about blowback."

Gee, I'm just quaking in my flip-flops out here. Why, I could be shot and my body dumped in Ft. Marcy Park, while Clinton campaign aides break into my office and spirit away my personal files ...

You're an ass. Why don't go away, and see if you can get Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones would be willing to do a three-way with you?

Well, I'm on record here and all over the toobs as saying that Rezko's going to hurt Obama. And I told political friends a year ago that Jeremiah Wright, whom most voters had never heard of, was going to be a problem for Obama, too.

Here in Chicago, Rev. Wright's nonsense is considered fairly par for the course in the scheme of race/religious/social relations. The city is full of loud crazyasses who can't have an unexpressed thought, however unethical, unconsidered or ill-advised. I've been through enough City Council meetings and seen enough rhetoric like this shouted down, or inspired in the first place by some damn fool saying something even stupider, that my capacity for outrage has shrunk quite a bit. We don't stop arguing with verbal garbage and pushing back against it--you have to--but if you tried to maintain the appropriate level of fury all day every day you'd never get anything else done around here.

But that doesn't mean I've ever been unable to see how badly this crap plays in the rest of the country, where people prefer their crazy Christian leaders to concentrate on more familiar themes, like fag bashing, Muslim baiting and Bush praising. No, I am not making one iota of an excuse for Rev. Wright's comments. I'm just saying that when it comes to rhetoric designed to shock, it's all what you're used to, and I know very well that most white Americans haven't heard this stuff before and find it not just offensive--which it is--but stunning as well. I know exactly how appalled people hearing this old man for the first time are.

So Obama's got a problem here. Do Rezko and Wright mean he's going to be a weaker candidate in the general than Clinton would be? Oh, lord, no. It is to laugh. But it doesn't do him any good to pretend he's not going to have to deal with this stuff. It's going to matter.

You're an ass. Why don't go away, and see if you can get Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones would be willing to do a three-way with you?

Pssssst. You're supposed to be selling the green beer, not gulping it yourself.

Donald: And please don't make yourself look stupid by trying to tell me that there's nothing to all this. Because if that was truly the case, Obama would never have felt compelled to sit down with reporters and attempt to diffuse the issue by trying to clarify his own tangential role in what's become clearly burgeoning political scandal in Illinois.

Wow, never thought I'd see the day when someone supporting a Clinton would go to the "don't tell me there's nothing to do this" card. We've been through so many scandals with the Clintons where "they had to have done something wrong" that I've lost count. You'd think Clinton supporters would be careful not to throw too many stones in their glass houses, especially since so many of these Clinton "scandals" turned out to be rubbish. Yet, the smallest whisper about Obama, and they immediately jump to the conclusion that Obama is guilty of something so dire that it will ruin his chances....

Wow, never thought I would see the day when someone supporting Obama would go to the "don't tell me I'm not stupid" card. Yet, the smallest whisper about Hillary, and Obamazooids immediately jump to conclusions...

The internet has a long memory, and a lot of you are going to really look like the fools you think the rest of us are. Anybody with a few functioning brain cels knows that Hillary Clinton is not a racist and is not using racism in her campaign. This was injected by Obamas campaign before South Carolina as a way to break Hillary's strength with the black voters. It worked so well, they are still doing it. Read the damn memo. Bill Clinton said that Jesse Jackson won the SC primary twice. That is racist? Give me a fuckin break.

Scotian, it's so nice to have you back.

Aloha, Donald

I believe that BO campaign is over.. He used the race card..Tarred the Clinton's and Hillary's supporters are racist... Then Rev Wright came along.
The You Tube footage of his sermon will be the first Republican commercial. And the game will be up.

You should not play the race card if your mentor, minister and surrogate uncle could be taken for a racist.. Rev Wright might be such a person.

geebee is a Retardican, just sayn'...

What's the problem with Wright, members of the 'liberal' blogosphere? Perhaps I haven't seen or read all of his 'shocking' sermon quotes but so far I've felt nostalgically connected to the 60's again by his words and not in the least 'shocked' by Obama's pastor. Obama did a fine job of not repudiating the 'man' on Countdown tonight, along with giving some of his credentials, a veteran marine and a biblical scholar. So - the blowback comment about America deserving what it got on 9/11? Chalmers Johnson beat him to that with his three books, the first most specifically. The talk about bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima? I've learned in the past several years that the first and only use of nuclear weapons was quite avoidable. God damn America? A bit over the line perhaps but not much worse to my mind than God Bless America, with the assumption that we deserve such a blessing in the first place. This is all old 60's stuff. If it's new to you youngsters then you've missed a lot of good oratory. I understand why Obama must renounce many of the words in order to make nice with his broad base. But as an old-time liberal there's certainly no need for him to do it for me.

Sharon,

It's nice to have YOU back. I've been a bit worried about you but guessed that you had just taken a short break from these warring cyber spaces, as I have done myself. I turn into a crazy person here, not a good thing.

This is really not a charge that we should be throwing around so lightly.

You got that fuckn' right.

What's the problem with Wright, members of the 'liberal' blogosphere?

I'd have to go with..."divisiveness". Sure, it works form time to time, but always fucks you in the end. Those that can stop themselves just before the edge of the cliff, always come out on top...

-elmo 3.14.08

Another Clinton campaign meme gets shot down, something in my view that IS important.

Clinton Role In Health Program Disputed

Noting racial started till after Hillary won New Hampshire then the media brought up "the Bradley effect" and that started the snowball rolling. Then it seemed like anything the Hillary campaign said was made out to be racist: the fairy tale remark, the MLK remark... there's alot more. Bill Clinton saying Obama won South Carolina because he's black is true, and was him trying to bring up the fact that the Obama campaign used race to turn the black vote against Hillary.

The controversy before that (the cocaine charge, his middle name being Hussein),... had nothing to do with race. That was the Clinton campaign playing typical politics, trying to bring up the fact that Obama may be unelectable because of these things. Thats partially what Bill Clinton was saying too after South Carolina, he was saying Obama is black and that may prevent him from being elected. Thats not racist to say that, its an opinion about electability.

The race card, being played by the Obama campaign, continues though because they know thats how they get out the black vote and the white liberal vote. Its also being pushed by a politically correct, left wing media too. They dont even realize theyre doing it because thats their mindset. The Obama campaign does know it though, theyre doing on purpose. Theyre playing the media like a violin.

One last thing, this seeing racism in everything is like McCarthyism imo. The people that see it in mostly innocent remarks really believe its racism. The same way the red baiters saw communism everywhere. It is a major problem imo in the black community and among liberals. Its not based in reality, its a kind of hysteria. Its what lead to the Duke case, and I think the same thing is at play in this election.

It works too, thats why the Obama campaign is using it. Theyre not worried about the general election now, they only focused on winning the nomination in a very liberal primary. Theyll worry about the general election later.

Joe: "Yet, the smallest whisper about Obama, and they immediately jump to the conclusion that Obama is guilty of something so dire that it will ruin his chances ..."

I've discussed the Obama-Rezko real estate deal adnauseum already, so I'll forgo any further discussion of that transaction here, with one exception (see #5 below).

But for the uninformed -- willful and otherwise -- here are a few of those "whispers" Joe is talking about.

(1) On the ABC Evening News last January 23, Sen. Obama said “no one had an inkling” of Rezko’s legal troubles during the course of their relationship.

In fact, the Chicago Sun-Times had already reported on its front page on September 16, 2005 that Mr. Rezko was under investigation for participating in a kickback scheme, which was prior to Obama's and Rezko's joint purchase of real property in the Chicago district of Kenwood.

(2) The Chicago Sun-Times on January 23, 2008 reported that the Obama campaign returned camaign contributions from people who were associated publicly Rezko.

But the Sun-Times' story also reported that the Obama campaign "declined to say" whether it could or would account for the total sum o funds Rezko raised for Mr. Obama over the course of his career. And until the Chicago Tribune's story tonight, Sen. Obama had declined to disclose the total sum of money that Rezko bundled for Sen. Obama campaign.

(3) The initial phase of Rezko's trial has focused upon his efforts to control state boards as a means to defraud the state government. In that trial, it was noted that then-State Sen. Obama opposed the sunset of the State Hospital Planning Board.

The Tribune reported on March 13, 2008 (yesterday) that Rezko controlled the votes of the board's majority, and orchestrated a controversial 2004 approval of the construction of a hospital in the NW Chicago suburb of Crystal Lake, after he had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from Chicago's Mercy Hospital, which had proposed the Crystal Lake facility. Two of the board members had pled guilty, and are goernment witnesses against Rezko.

(4) The New York Times reported on October 10, 2007 that Obama met with members of three state pension boards, and urged them to give contracts to specific firms associated with Tony Rezko. Later, employees of these same firms "donated more than $300,000 to help Mr. Obama win his seat in the United States Senate in 2004 and set fund-raising records early in the 2008 presidential race."

(5) According to a New York Times report on June 14, 2007, Sen. Obama attended a business meeting on behalf of Mr. Rezko to impress potential investors for his business schemes: "Former Rezko associates said that Governor Blagojevich attended one of the dinners, and that at Mr. Rezko's request, Mr. Obama dropped in at one for Middle Eastern bankers in early 2004, just as he was starting to pull ahead in the Senate primary. The visits, Mr. Rezko's partners said, helped impress foreign guests."

One of those foreign guests was Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire living in London who was convicted in 2003 by a French court for for colluding illegally with French oilmen and government officials in various Middle Eastern oil deals.

The Times of London further reported that Mr. Auchi lent Rezko $3.5 million on May 25, 2005, and further raised the possibility that Rezko's wife Rita used some of those funds to assist Barack and Michelle Obama in the purchase of their home in Kenwood, by buying the vacant,recently subdivided lot adjacent to the Obamas' faux-Georgian mansion. Even though Rita listed only $32,000 in annual income and no savings of her own, she nevertheless secured a $500,000 mortgage loan and provide another $125,000 in cash to purchase the yard of the recently subdivided estate, and to carry that debt burden at least until December, 2006.

All told, Mr. Auchi is alleged to have transferred up to $27.9 million in funds to Rezko between the period between February 2003 and June 2007.

(6) Sen. Obama has tried to minimize his relationship with Tony Rezko. In his South Carolina debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama claimed that Rezko was merely "an individual he knew", and further that as an attorney, he had billed five hours for work on behalf of one of Rezko's nonprofit partners in an inner-city redevelopment project.

In fact, when Obama first ran for the Illinois state senate in 1996, Rezko was one of his first campaign contributors. He has remained a significant contributor to and fundraiser for Obama's subsequent campaigns.

The Times of London further reported on March 3, 2008 that the jury in rezko's trial that "is [expected] to hear from John Thomas, an FBI mole, who reportedly witnessed Mr Obama and [Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich] making frequent visits to Mr Rezko."

(7) From the Chicago Sun-Times on June 13, 2007: "As a state senator, Barack Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting his political patron Tony Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens."

I'll let everyone chew on all that for awhile.

Donald in Hawaii: "In that trial, it was noted that then-State Sen. Obama opposed the sunset of the State Hospital Planning Board."

I neglected to mention that Obama was chair of the Illinois Senate's Health Committee at the time he expressed his opposition to the dissolution of that board.

P.S. to shortstop: Murphy's is in fact a real Irish saloon; we don't do "green beer." We will, however, have plenty of Harp and Guinness on tap this weekend, and will probably go through about 250 kegs of those two alone by the time we shut down at midnight on Monday. And when you next come to Honolulu, the "black-and-tans" are on me.

P.S. to shortstop: Murphy's is in fact a real Irish saloon; we don't do "green beer."

Or Portuguese, I see from your flyer.

Thanks for the kind offer, but I just got back from Honolulu--and when I'm on Oahu, I'm either working or in the water every minute.

Ex-slave owning European Americans think being told by an African American clergyman they were never called the N word or not raped by their owners is an example of 'reverse' racism. The descendants of ex-slave owning European Americans have a very delicate sensitivity about the sins of their rapist, mob lynching ancestors.

Kevin is always fair-minded and usually astute but I think he misunderstands Sean Wilentz's original claim. Wilentz argued that Obama was introducing race as a frame, to discredit criticisms of him and to discount events that might otherwise reflect badly on him. Wilentz's first case in point was the Obama campaign's invocation of the "Bradley effect" to explain his defeat in New Hampshire. Wilentz asserted that there was no evidence at all of the "Bradley effect" because Obama got exactly what he was polling. (The "Bradley effect" involves a black candidate who gets less than he polls because some people who tell pollsters that they are going to vote for him, don't.) Framing the New Hampshire defeat this way minimizes its importance at the very least. A second aspect of Obama's use of race, Wilentz argued, involved characterizing remarks made by Clinton that had no racial aspect, or remarks not attributable to her which did have at least a racial subtext, as though the first kind of remark had a hidden racial subtext and the second was properly attributable to her. Wilentz claimed that the result and intent of this kind of framing was both to inncoluate Obama against criticism and to portray those who criticized him as either racists, or people who would stoop to playing the race card because they had no principles at all. Wilentz is right that this kind of framing -- if it succeeds -- works to Obama's advantage.

On the other hand, the use of race that the "Obama campaign" is now being accused of -- a use epitomized by the the accusation that Geraldine Ferraro is a racist or was playing the race card on Clinton's behalf -- does not appear to be to Obama's advantage. Ferraro was expressing (it seems to me) a resentment that has age, gender and ethnic aspects. Age and gender because women of her age think that, whereas they faced "glass ceilings" and could not succeed beyond a certain point no matter how good they were, some elite blacks like Obama benefit from a lesser standard. Ethnic, because lots of white ethnic blue collar voters think that they are victims of "reverse discrimination" beneficial to blacks like Obama. Similar beliefs seem fairly widespread among Latinos in California. Obama is already doing very badly with these groups; if he were doing well he would have the nomination sewn up already. Calling these voters "racist" is pretty much last on any list of ways to attract them to Obama's candidacy.

If you put these stories together, you have the "Obama campaign" looking -- from the day after the New Hampshire primary to the last few days before the Texas and Ohio primaries -- like a group that practices the dark arts of politics with a genius Machiavelli would have admired and like a group of fools bent on doing themselves damage ever since.

How much sense this story makes, I'm not sure. But I do think that the strategy Wilentz originally accused the Obama campaign of would have been to its advantage.

The age old question - who benefits? Hillary who needs white voters to come out and vote for her and is appealing to them with subtle racial tactics or Obama who needs black and white voters to be disgusted with Hillary and refuse to vote for her because she is a monster. Only the press knows for sure.

Actually Aline, no one has really explained why Hillary would through away large group AA's, for a smaller group like "white voters who can't vote for a Black man", it makes no sense.

The distressing part is that the center-left blogoshpere is rampant with disingenuous posts like this and a disinterested reader should be concerned that blogs seem to want to have their newsy little cake and eat it too - ie the mandate 'serious' blogs want to claim for themselves seems increasingly to be as phony as a Fox.

You said it, Alice B! Hooray!

Soullite: how do I prove I'm not a racist...?

I've been wondering that too, Soullite. It's an especially thorny problem for me since I have so many African Americans in my own immediate family.

Avedon 12:01

Bravo! More, please!

This was injected by Obamas campaign before South Carolina as a way to break Hillary's strength with the black voters. It worked so well, they are still doing it. Read the damn memo.

Abso-fucking-lutely!

Simple math answers the question raised here. What is certain is that Barack Obama faces a test of leadership. His supporters face a test of determination.

http://acropolisreview.com/2008/03/barack-obama-condemns-reverend-jeremiah.html

Of course, there's a third possibility - that the race-baiting is being done by the Republicans so that the Dems tear each other apart and weaken whatever candidate wins the nomination. As the old Chicago politics saying goes, cui bono?

I agree that the Obama campaign has been trying to frame the Clintons as race-baiters.

To understand how Axelrod is running this campaign (which is mostly behind the scenes), I recommend the following two articles:

The NYT on David Axelrod
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/magazine/01axelrod.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Ryan Lizza's great GQ piece on Obama
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_5841

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