Running as "The Great White Hope," Hillary Clinton Has Alienated the African-American Vote and Endangered a Democratic Victory

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Dee Turner

I am one of the many thousands of African-Americans who are actively engaged with the Democratic Party. (I began immediately following my college graduation). I have held my nose and voted for a few Dems that I really didn't care for. I truly loved and supported Bill Clinton. During the Monica Lewinsky debacle, I sent in endless messages of support and had several letters printed in the Atlanta newspaper in defense of Bill. I was even a member of what was known as the "First Lady's Club"....a group in support of Hillary.

After my first choice (John Edwards) left this presidential race, I turned to Barack Obama. It appears that Obama will be the Democratic nominee. I have read that many Hillary supporters are saying that they won't vote for Obama. This is appalling to me and many others in my community who have been extremely loyal to the Democratic Party.

We are all suffering because of the Iraq War, job losses, little or no health care, poor air quality, etc.......we are all in the same boat and John McCain will give us 4 more years of GeeDubya Bush's failed policies. Who will best represent us?

As I observe the next few weeks and continue to receive messages from the Democratic Party for financial support, I will be truly interested to see if my white sisters and brothers turn away because Barack has defeated Hillary or because he is a "black candidate". I can't speak for others, but my dedicated association with the Dems will incur some serious thought if other Dems refuse to support this candidate.


Respectfully,
Dee Turner
Atlanta

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

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Supporting Obama

Millions of Democratic voters have supported Obama in the primaries and there's no reason to think that he won't earn wide support among Democrats, progressives, and independent-minded voters who understand that the Bush administration has been a disaster for the country on many many fronts. I won't try to repeat the ways.

My daughter's in-laws, nice middle of the road Republicans, around 70 years old, voted for Obama in the Iowa caucuses - they and a lot of their friends.

Narrow-minded, fearful, and prejudiced people may not vote for him, even if they sometimes vote for Democrats. Too bad for them. Unless you're a died-in-the-wool conservative and really like the Bush administration, it doesn't make sense to vote for anyone but Obama, if he is the nominee.

Obama has energized many voters, young and maybe not so young, who have registered to vote and actually have voted.

I hope he will live up to the hopes so many have in him.

Colleen Clark
Cambridge, MA

Dedication to Party

Your threat to leave if I don't support your choice for president is a real motivator.

The great white hope

It seems to me that Obama supporters are ignoring the 800 lbs gorilla in the room. Namely the racist black vote. When 90% of the black community vote for one candidate the only thing they have in common is color.Every one wants to talk about working class white ,or white women or lunch bucket voters or soccer moms. Nobody wants to talk about 90% black voters voting as a block. Why the silence? When one group adopts that posture others feel threatened and unite to protect themselves.The silence is more ominous still. Why are people afraid to address this issue?

Great White Hope--Would Be Hillary,Fool,,,,,,,Not Obama

You wrote:

"When one group adopts that posture others feel threatened and unite to protect themselves.The silence is more ominous still...."

Maybe you're FINALLY STARTING TO REALIZE what Blacks have felt for centuries...and how it must feel.....eh, GENIUS?

You know one exercise of logic you racist, little creeps NEVER want to address? Blacks have voted in EVERY ELECTION OF THE LAST HALF CENTURY---FOR A WHITE MAN--so, its safe to assume--THEY ALL--have voted for a white person--AT LEAST ONCE!

Now, there are those in Hillarys camp, one would suppose, such as yourself, WHO HAVE NEVER VOTED FOR A BLACK PERSON....and have publically stated----THEY NEVER WILL.

So, which is the "racist" vote?

I wonder.

Did you object to Mrs. Bill Clinton pandering to the woman's vote by having her mother and daughter on stage, assuming six breasts are more supportive of women than mere two? There is far, far more reason for blacks to support a black candidate than for women to support a woman candidate. But racist a-holes such as yourself don't seem to realize that.

Dee Turner's great comments

I'm an old white guy in Georgia (Smyrna), but I agree wholeheartedly with what Dee Turner wrote. Like her, my initial allegiance was to John Edwards (my #1 reason was his health care plan), and like her, Barack Obama got my support after Edwards withdrew. It is absurd for Democrats to even contemplate not pulling together and enthusiastically supporting our nominee. If we don't, the party will no longer deserve our support in the future. But our nation needs Barack Obama far more than he--or any identity group--needs the presidency. Thanks, Dee Wilson. Regards to all, Ed Buckner Smyrna GA 30082

I WISH.......

We could mass produce you in this party, Ed. It sorely NEEDS several hundred thousand you's.

I wish, too

Alas, I'm too old to engage directly in reproducing me any more (we do have a fine son and he is, of course, supporting Obama)--but my wife and I are committed to working towards less direct ways of reproducing ourselves for the fall election. And, optimist that I somehow remain, I'm going to inquire, today, about reservations in Washington, DC, next January. We want to be there and hear Obama's First Inaugural Address live and unfiltered. It'll be on a par with the best presidential speeches in American history and will, I hope and think, still be inspiring Americans a hundred years from now. Regards to all, Ed B. Proud Obama Democrat Smyrna GA 30082 / ed@buckners.us

Way to Go, Ed......

I like your sense of humor, it has a nice irony to it, as well as your commitment to, what I think, is a noble cause. Who knows? I might very well be there next to you In D.C.....we'll see

Meanwhile, may you go with God.....

It wasn't just Race-Baiting that made Hillary's campaign so ugly

It wasn't just Race-Baiting that made Hillary's campaign so awfully ugly....

Over at HuffPost, Thomas Edsall wrote:
"Clinton's success among white voters is very likely to continue to raise questions concerning Obama's viability among whites, who play a larger role in general elections than in Democratic primaries."

Obama was doing JUST FINE with "white voters".. until the Rev. Wright video hit the endless network media loop, the media trying to do with the Rev. Wright video what they had done to Gov. Dean with the "Dean Scream."

The good news is that Hillary's base "race-baiting, gas-tax-pandering, gun pandering, beer pandering, 'nuke Iran', make friends with Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife campaign" highlighted what we "Democratic wing of Democratic Party" voters have been saying (shouting) for years - that the top levels of the inside-beltway DC Democrats have become entirely too cozy with Big Business, corporate America, K St. lobbyists, Wall St. loan sharks... & especially the major-media pooh-bahs, who at every opportunity tout the "Tax cuts for wealthy in time of war, screw the peons" agenda.
(Not to forget the "More War Now" lobby.)

We Democratic voters don't reflexively hate corporations - just when their greed and influence is so strong that they can blatantly lie to us.

I was staying at a home near a big city that had no cable TV... so I had no choice but to watch the 3 or 4 broadcast channels. The "news" content of their Network nightly newscast was... ZERO! Twenty minutes of weather, twenty minutes of local-interest stories and banter between the anchors, and twenty minutes of commercials was all you get for watching. One night, they did a full 5 minute (plus) segment on... a Daschund dog that had recovered from cancer surgery! NO similar time is ever spent on our WOUNDED, TRAUMATIZED, returning war VETERANS!
It is beyond simply shamefull and disgraceful.... we are into the realm of the German media during WWII, a relentless propaganda machine to white-wash the regime and ignore the "disappeared," even our own war-hero veterans, which coverage would make the media's pandering for tax-cuts for the rich and glitzy look, well, shameless.

Another example of the media's absolutely contentless 'news' coverage is that Obama blew out Hillary in North Carolina by over 200,000 votes, while she prevailed in Indiana with less than 20,000. (And many of those were probably Republican "ditto-heads" crossing over to make mischief in Dem. primary, with no intention to vote Democratic in the fall.)
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/dates/#20080506

200,000 to 20,000.... you might think that a 20 to 200 vote would make a compelling, easy-to-explain media news story? Not so with our PURPOSELY UNINFORMATIVE major-media "news".

===========================================

SO, you have a network media that is inherently uninformative; a network media with a vested interest in keeping the "HORSE RACE" or "knock-down, drag-out battle between two heavyweights" going, simply so they can pose another teaser of a 'news' story that has "Obama down" or "Clinton up" lead for that day's headlines....

All the above just as a preamble to the worst aspects of Hillary's campaign, how right across the board, from Race-Baiting to Fear-mongering to blatant Bush-Cheneyesque corruption and insider no-bid, no-oversight profiteering contracts, Hillary ran her campaign as a Karl Rove Republican fear-and-smear, race-baiting and fear-mongering campaign.

Hillary's "obliterate Iran" comment TOPPED anything Bush or Cheney have said to date... pretty amazing, since Cheney's "Attack Iran Now!" comment brought the 2007 AIPAC convention to its feet in a standing ovation.
http://www.aipac.org/2785_2859.asp

Let's face it, a huge portion of Hillary's once "INEVITABLE!" campaign war-chest came from making promises... promises for consideration as Ambassador or other government positions in a future Clinton administration... or even worse, more blatantly Bush-Cheneyesque whispers of favorable tax breaks, or (worse yet) huge insider, no-bid contracts dealt out to her big-biz supporters.
( Come to think of it - JUST WHAT did Hillary promise Murdoch and Scaife?)

I can still barely believe that the Obama campaign did not even bring up - Bill Clinton's TEN MILLION DOLLAR PAYOFF for lobbying Kazahkstan's version of SADDAM HUSSEIN for a billion-dollar uranium mining contract in that brutally oppressed country!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html

(Note: almost impossible to believe, the $10 million payoff Bill Clinton got for lobbying that Giustra/Kazakhstan uranium deal, is only the down-payment of a $130 million, ONE-HUNDRED-AND-THIRTY-MILLION DOLLAR payoff, mining financier Frank Giustra has pledged to the Clinton foundation, according to the Times reporting, at the expense of political opponents in Kazakhstan and and human rights advocates worldwide.)

And the above doesn't even mention President Clinton's ill-advised approval for the sale of Indiana company Magnaquench Techologies to China, a company that manufactured the rare-earth magnet electric motors vital to US fighter jets and rockets, a company that has now completely closed its doors in Indiana and moved lock, stock, and barrel to China!
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4757257

Regardless of how much Bill and Hillary tout their campaign to heartland, working-class America, their real message was undeniable: the DC and corporate fat-cats will continue to get fat, making billions of dollars off of taxpayer's and strapped consumers' wallets.... and the only "shaking up" Hillary would do, is to continue SHAKING DOWN big donors.

(Not to mention, Hillary shamelessly pandered her support for the ridiculous 18-cent per gallon gas-tax holiday - an estimated $27 per family in tax savings between labor day and memorial day, which would, #1, rob desperately needed jobs from desperately needed highway and infrastructure repairs; and #2. would never in a million years get by the George Bush veto pen between now and November, Hillary's cheap promises notwithstanding).

Shameless pandering, shameless shakedowns, shameless race-baiting, shameless fear-mongering, shameless cozying up to Murdoch and Scaife, Bill Clinton cozying up to Kazakhstan's murderous dictator for a $130 million payoff... how is the real essence of the Hillary 2008 campaign any different from the Karl Rove led campaigns of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004?

THE REAL TRUTH OF WHO WAS THE RACE BAITER !!!!!

Misleading propaganda is hardly new in American politics --although the adoption of techniques reminiscent of past Republican and special-interest hit jobs, right down to a retread of the fictional couple, seems strangely at odds with a campaign that proclaims it will redeem the country from precisely these sorts of divisive and manipulative tactics. As insidious as these tactics are, though, the Obama campaign's most effective gambits have been far more egregious and dangerous than the hypocritical deployment of deceptive and disingenuous attack ads. To a large degree, the campaign's strategists turned the primary and caucus race to their advantage when they deliberately, falsely, and successfully portrayed Clinton and her campaign as unscrupulous race-baiters--a campaign-within-the-campaign in which the worked-up flap over the Somali costume photograph is but the latest episode. While promoting Obama as a "post-racial" figure, his campaign has purposefully polluted the contest with a new strain of what historically has been the most toxic poison in American politics. More than any other maneuver, this one has brought Clinton into disrepute with important portions of the Democratic Party. A review of what actually happened shows that the charges that the Clintons played the "race card" were not simply false; they were deliberately manufactured by the Obama camp and trumpeted by a credulous and/or compliant press corps in order to strip away her once formidable majority among black voters and to outrage affluent, college-educated white liberals as well as college students. The Clinton campaign, in fact, has not racialized the campaign, and never had any reason to do so. Rather the Obama campaign and its supporters, well-prepared to play the "race-baiter card" before the primaries began, launched it with a vengeance when Obama ran into dire straits after his losses in New Hampshire and Nevada--and thereby created a campaign myth that has turned into an incontrovertible truth among political pundits, reporters, and various Obama supporters. This development is the latest sad commentary on the malign power of the press, hyping its own favorites and tearing down those it dislikes, to create pseudo-scandals of the sort that hounded Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. It is also a commentary on how race can make American politics go haywire. Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama's supposedly uplifting campaign. Even before the first caucus met in Iowa, the Obama campaign was ready to play a similar game. In mid-December 2007, one of the Clinton campaign's co-chairs in New Hampshire, Bill Shaheen, remarked entirely on his own on how the Republicans might make mischievous and damaging political use of Obama's admitted use of marijuana and cocaine during his youth. The observation was not especially astute: Since George W. Bush, both the electorate and the press have seemed to be forgiving of a candidate's youthful substance abuse, so long as says he has reformed himself. Nor had the Clinton campaign prompted Shaheen to make his comment. But it was not a harebrained remark, given how the Republicans had once tried to exploit the cocaine addiction of Bill Clinton's brother, Roger, and even manufactured lurid falsehoods about Clinton himself as the member of a cocaine smuggling ring during his years as governor in Arkansas. And it was not in the least a racist comment, as cocaine abuse has afflicted Americans of all colors as well as classes. Indeed, there have been persistent rumors that Bush abused cocaine as well as alcohol during his younger days--charges he addressed in the 2000 campaign by saying that when "he was young and foolish" he had done "foolish" things. None of the reports at the time about Shaheen's miscue (and the Clinton campaign's decision to relieve him of his ceremonial duties) mentioned anything about racial overtones. Yet the Obama campaign kept stirring things up. After being questioned for ten minutes about the drug allegation on cable television--and repeatedly denying that the national campaign had anything to do with it--Clinton campaign pollster Mark Penn mentioned the word "cocaine" (which was difficult to avoid in the context of the repeated questioning about drugs). "I think we've made clear that the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising, and I think that's been made clear," he said. Obama's campaign aides (as well as John Edwards's) immediately leapt on Penn and chastised him as an inflammatory demagogue for using the word that Obama himself referred to in his memoir as "blow." Since then, Obama's strategists and supporters in the press have whipped the story into a full racialist subtext, as if Shaheen and Penn were the executors of a well-plotted Clinton master plan to turn Obama into a stereotypical black street hoodlum--or, in the words of the fervently pro-Obama and anti-Clinton columnist Frank Rich of the New York Times, "ghettoized as a cocaine user." The racial innuendo seemed to fade when Obama won his remarkable victory in the Iowa caucuses. With the polling data on the upcoming New Hampshire primary auguring a large Obama triumph, it looked as if the candidate's own appeal might sweep away everything before it. But at the last minute (as sometimes happens in statewide primaries), there was a sudden movement among the voters, this time toward Clinton. Many ascribed it to an appearance by Clinton in a Portsmouth coffee shop on the eve of the vote, where, with emotion, she spoke from the heart about why she is running for president. Others said that misogyny directed at Clinton on the campaign trail as well as on cable television and the Internet turned off women voters. The uprising was certainly sudden: As late as 6 p.m. on primary day, Clinton staff members with whom I spoke were saying that they would consider a loss by ten percentage points or less as a kind of moral victory. But instead, Clinton won outright, amazing her own delighted supporters and galling the Obama campaign. That evening, the Democratic campaign became truly tangled up in racial politics--directly and forcefully introduced by the pro-Obama forces. In order to explain away the shocking loss, Obama backers vigorously spread the claim that the so-called Bradley Effect had kicked in. First used to account for the surprising defeat of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley in the California gubernatorial race in 1982, the Bradley Effect supposedly takes hold when white voters tell opinion pollsters that they plan to vote for a black candidate but instead, driven by racial fears, pull the lever for a white candidate. Senior Clinton campaign officials later told me that reporters contacted them saying that the Obama camp was pushing them very hard to spin Clinton's victory as the latest Bradley Effect result. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a cheerleading advocate for Obama, went on television to suggest the Bradley Effect explained the New Hampshire outcome, then backed off--only then to write a column, "Echoes of Tom Bradley," in which he claimed he could not be sure but that, nevertheless, "embarrassed pollsters and pundits had better be vigilant for signs that the Bradley effect, unseen in recent years, has crept back." In fact, the Bradley Effect claims were utterly bogus, as anyone with an elementary command of voting results could tell. If the "effect" has actually occurred, Obama's final voting figures would have been substantially lower than his figures in the pre-election polls, as racially motivated voters turned away. Later, Bill Schneider, the respected analyst on CNN, several times went through the data on air to demonstrate conclusively that there was no such Bradley Effect in New Hampshire. But even on primary night, it was clear that Obama's total--36.4%--was virtually identical to what the polls over the previous three weeks had predicted he would receive. Clinton won because late-deciding voters--and especially college-educated women in their twenties--broke for her by a huge majority. Yet the echoes of charges about the Bradley Effect--which blamed Obama's loss on white racism and mendacity--lingered among Obama's supporters. The very next morning, Obama's national co-chair, Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., a congressional supporter from Chicago, played the race card more directly by appearing on MSNBC to claim in a well-prepared statement that Clinton's emotional moment on the campaign trail was actually a measure of her deeply ingrained racism and callousness about the suffering poor. "But those tears also have to be analyzed," Jackson said, "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 percent of African-Americans will participate in the Democratic contest ... we saw tears in response to her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not Hurricane Katrina, not other issues." And so the Obama campaign headed south with race and racism very much on its mind--and on its lips. III. By the time Clinton and Obama (along with Edwards) debated in South Carolina, it was clear that nerves had been rubbed raw. Obama's supporters, including New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, had been making much of a lame, off-color but obviously preposterous joke that Martin Luther King's close friend and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young had made back in December about Bill Clinton having slept with more black women than Obama. Supposedly, Young's tasteless quip--"I'm just clowning," he said, sounding embarrassed--was as part of some sort of concerted Clinton campaign. Likewise, also in December, former Senator Bob Kerrey's misinformed defense of Obama, in an interview on CNN, for having attended a secular madrassa in Indonesia (he did not) became twisted by the pro-Obama camp, including Herbert once again, into some sort of sneak attack orchestrated by cynical, race-baiting Clintonites. Kerrey is a Clinton supporter, but is notoriously unscripted. Once again, the Clinton campaign had to apologize. But the Obama campaign began ratcheting up the racial politics in earnest during the run-up to the South Carolina contest. It has never been satisfactorily explained why the pro-Clinton camp would want to racialize the primary and caucus campaign. The argument has been made that Hillary Clinton wanted to attract whites and Hispanics in the primaries and make the case that a black candidate would be unelectable in the general election. But given the actual history of the campaign, that argument makes no sense. Until late in 2007, Hillary Clinton enjoyed the backing of a substantial majority of black voters--as much as 24 percentage points over Obama according to one poll in October--as well as strong support from Hispanics and traditional working-class white Democrats. It appeared, for a time, as if she might well be able to recreate, both in the primaries and the general election, the cross-class and cross-racial alliances that had eluded Democrats for much of the previous forty years. Playing the race card against Obama could only cost her black votes, as well as offend liberal whites who normally turn out in disproportionally large numbers for Democratic caucuses and primaries. Indeed, indulging in racial politics would be a sure-fire way for the Clinton campaign to shatter its own coalition. On the other hand, especially in South Carolina where black voters made up nearly half of the Democratic turnout, and especially following the shocking disappointment in New Hampshire, playing the race card--or, more precisely, the race-baiting card--made eminent sense for the Obama campaign. Doing so would help Obama secure huge black majorities (in states such as Missouri and Virginia as well as in South Carolina and the deep South) and enlarge his activist white base in the university communities and among affluent liberals. And that is precisely what happened. First came the Martin Luther King-Lyndon B. Johnson controversy. Responding to early questions that he was only offering vague words of hope instead of policy substance, Obama had given a speech in New Hampshire referring to Martin Luther King, Jr. "standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial" during his "I have a dream" speech. (This rhetorical formulation was reminiscent of a campaign speech delivered in 2006 by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, another client of David Axelrod, Obama's message and media guru; in a later speech, Obama would repeat Patrick's rhetoric word for word.) When asked about it, Clinton replied that while, indeed, King had courageously inspired and led the civil rights movement, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," she said, adding that "it took a president to get it done." The statement was, historically, non-controversial; the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others, later said that Clinton "was absolutely right." The political implication was plainly that Clinton was claiming to have more of the experience and skills required of a president than Obama did--not that King should be denigrated. But the Obama campaign and its supporters chose to pounce on the remark as the latest example of the Clinton campaign's race baiting. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black congressman--neutral in the race, but pressured by the Obama campaign arousing his constituency--felt compelled to repeat the charge that Clinton had disparaged King, and told the New York Times that "we have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics." Several of the Times's op-ed columnists, including Bob Herbert and Maureen Dowd as well as Rich, rushed to amplify how Hillary was playing dirty, as did the newspaper's editorial page, which disgracefully twisted her remarks into an implication that "a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change." Clinton complained that her opponent's backers were deliberately distorting her remarks; and Obama smoothly tried to appear above the fray, as if he knew that the race-baiting charge was untrue and didn't want to level it directly, but didn't exactly want to discourage the idea either. "Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson. I didn't make the statement," Obama said in a conference call with reporters. "I haven't remarked on it. And she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King's role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act. She is free to explain that. But the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous." Meanwhile, below the radar, the Obama campaign pushed the race-baiting angle hard, rehearsing and sometimes inventing instances of alleged Clintonian racial insensitivity. A memo prepared by the South Carolina campaign and circulated to supporters rehashed the King-Johnson matter, while it also spliced together statements of Bill Clinton's to make it seem as if he had given a speech that "implied Hillary Clinton is stronger than Nelson Mandela." (The case, with its snippets and ellipses, was absurd on its face.) The memo also claimed, in a charge soon widely repeated, that he had demeaned Obama as "a kid" because he had called Obama's account of his opposition to the war in Iraq a fanciful "fairy tale."And a few reporters, while pushing the Obama campaign's line that black voters had credible concerns about the Clintons' remarks, had begun to notice that the Obama campaign was doing its utmost to fuel the racial flames. "There's no question that there's politics here at work too," said Jonathan Martin of Politico. "It helps [Obama's] campaign to... push these issues into the fore in a place like South Carolina." When asked about the race-baiting charges, Obama campaign spokeswoman Candice Tolliver roiled the waters: "Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this really an isolated situation or is there something bigger behind all of this?" Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., the Obama co-chair, as before, was more direct and inflammatory, claiming that the "cynics" of the Clinton campaign had "resorted to distasteful and condescending language that appeals to our fears rather than our hopes. I sincerely hope that they'll turn away from such reactionary, disparaging rhetoric." The race-baiting card was now fully in play. Among those dismayed by Obama's tactics and his supporters' was Bill Moyers. In a special segment on his weekly PBS broadcast in mid-January, Moyers, who as a young man had been an aide to President Johnson, demolished the charge that Clinton had warped history in order to race-bait Obama. "There was nothing in [Clinton's] quote about race," he observed. "It was an historical fact, an affirmation of the obvious." Moyers rehashed what every reputable historian knows about how King and Johnson effectively divided the labor, between King the agitator and Johnson the president, in order to secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Moyers said was happy to see that, by the time he went on the air, the furor appeared to be dying down and that everyone seemed to be returning to their senses and apologizing--"except," he pointedly noted, "the New York Times." But this upbeat part of his assessment proved overly optimistic. IV. By the time the Obama campaign backed off from agitating the King-Johnson pseudo-scandal, it had already trained its sights on Bill Clinton--by far the most popular U.S. president among African Americans over the past quarter-century. Not only were Bill and Hillary supposedly ganging up on Obama in South Carolina--"I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes," Obama complained during the South Carolina debate--the former president was supposedly off on a race-baiting tear of his own. Yet, once again, the charges were either distortions or outright inventions. The Obama campaign's "fairy tale" gambit was particularly transparent. Commenting on Obama's explanation of why he is more against the war in Iraq than Hillary Clinton, and disturbed by the news media's failure to report Obama's actual voting record on Iraq in the Senate, the former president referred to what had become the conventional wisdom as a "fairy tale" concocted by Obama and his supporters. Time to play the race-baiter card! One of Obama's most prominent backers, the mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, stretched Clinton's remarks and implied that he had called Obama's entire candidacy a fairy tale. (The mayor later coyly told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she had not intended to criticize Clinton: "Surely you don't mean he's the only one who can use the phrase 'fairy tale,'" Franklin said, in a tone that the reporter described as "mock indignation.") Appearing on CNN, one of its pundits, Donna Brazile, hurled the wild charge that Clinton had likened Obama to a child. "And I will tell you," she concluded, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing." With those kinds of remarks--"as an African American"--the race card and the race-baiter card both came back into play. Although Brazile is formally not part of Obama's campaign, her comments made their way to the South Carolina memo, offered as evidence that Clinton's comment was racially insensitive. On January 26, Obama won a major victory in South Carolina by gaining the overwhelming majority of the black vote and a much smaller percentage of the white vote, for a grand total of 55 percent. Although the turnout, of course, was much larger for the 2008 primaries than for any previous primary or caucus, Obama had assembled a victorious coalition analogous to that built by Jesse Jackson in the 1984 and 1988 South Carolina caucuses. (Bill Clinton won the 1992 state primary with 69 percent of the vote, far outstripping either Jackson's or Obama's percentages.) When asked by a reporter on primary day why it would take two Clintons to beat Obama, the former president, in good humor, laughed and said that he would not take the bait: Jesse Jackson won in South Carolina twice in '84 and '88 and he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama's run a good campaign. He's run a good campaign everywhere. He's a good candidate with a good organization. According to Obama and his supporters, here was yet another example of subtle race-baiting. Clinton had made no mention of race. But by likening Jackson's victories and Obama's impending victory and by praising Obama as a good candidate not simply in South Carolina but everywhere, Clinton was trying to turn Obama into the "black" candidate and racialize the campaign. Or so the pro-Obama camp charged. Clinton's sly trick, supposedly, was to mention Jackson and no other Democrat who had previously prevailed in South Carolina--thereby demeaning Obama's almost certain victory as a "black" thing. But the fact remains that Clinton, who watches internal polls closely and is an astute observer, knew whereof he spoke: when the returns were counted, Obama's and Jackson's percentages of the overall vote and the key to their victories--a heavy majority among blacks--truly were comparable. The only other Democrats Clinton could have mentioned would have been himself (who won more than two-thirds of the vote in 1992, far more than either Jackson or Obama) and John Edwards (who won only 45 percent in 2004, far less than either Jackson or Obama). Given the differences, given that by mentioning himself, Clinton could have easily been criticized for being self-congratulatory, and given that Edwards had not yet dropped out of the 2008 race, the omissions were not at all surprising. By mentioning Jackson alone, the former president was being accurate--and, perhaps, both modest and polite. But Obama's supporters willfully hammered him as a cagey race-baiter. Not everyone agreed with the race-baiting charge--including Jesse Jackson himself. Jackson noted proudly to Essence magazine that he had, indeed, won in 1984 and 1988, and, even though he had endorsed Obama, criticized the Obama campaign, saying, "again, I think it's some more gotcha politics." Hillary Clinton's unexpected popular victory in Nevada and her crushing Super Tuesday wins in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and California seemed, according to media reports, to have been offset by Obama's more numerous victories in much smaller states that Democrats are highly unlikely to win in a general election. His string of victories in caucuses and primaries over the next four weeks gave the Obama campaign undeniable momentum. But Obama and his strategists kept the race and race-baiter cards near the top of their campaign deck--and the news media continued to report on the contest (or decline to report Obama's role as instigator) as if they had fallen in line. The New York Times, for example, opened its front page on February 15th to report an utterly inaccurate and possibly wishful story that Representative John Lewis of Georgia--a genuine hero of the civil rights movement, a courageous voice for integration, and a stalwart Clinton supporter--had announced that he had decided that, in his role as superdelegate, he would vote for Obama. Lewis quickly called the story false, although he added that he was wrestling with his conscience over whether to switch. Meanwhile, the press generally ignored a report, confirmed by all involved, that Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., had warned one of Clinton's unshakable black supporters, Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, that he'd better line up behind Obama. Jackson, once again playing the role of the Obama campaign's "race man" enforcer, posed a leading question: "Do you want to go down in history as the one to prevent a black from winning the White House?" Black congressmen were threatened to fall or line or face primary challenges. "So you wake up without the carpet under your feet. You might find some young primary challenger placing you in a difficult position," Jackson said. Yet for the Obama-inspired press corps, it was the Clintons who were playing the race card. "The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up," wrote Frank Rich, Obama's vehement advocate in the New York Times. The Obama campaign has yet to reach bottom in its race-baiter accusations. On February 25, Hillary Clinton planned to deliver a major foreign policy address, an area in which Obama's broad expertise is relatively weak. Clinton was also riding high in the Ohio polls, despite the Obama campaign's false charges about her health plan and support for NAFTA. That same day, the notoriously right-wing, scandal-mongering Drudge Report website ran a photograph of Obama dressed in the traditional clothing of a Somali elder during a tour of Africa, attached to an assertion, without evidence, that the Clinton campaign was "circulating" the picture. The story was silly on its face--there are plenty of photographs of Hillary Clinton and virtually every other major American elected official dressed in the traditional garb of other countries, and Obama's was no different. The alleged "circulation" amounted, on close reading, to what Drudge's dispatch said was an e-mail from one unnamed Clinton "staffer" to another idly wondering what the coverage might have been if the picture had been of Clinton. Possible e-mail chatter about an inoffensive picture as spun by the Drudge Report would not normally be deemed newsworthy, even in these degraded times. Except by Obama and his campaign, who jumped on the insinuating circumstances as a kind of vindication. The Drudge posting included reaction from the pinnacle of Obama's campaign team. "It's exactly the kind of divisive politics that turns away Americans of all parties and diminishes respect for America in the world," said Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe, who also described the non-story as "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election" and "part of a disturbing pattern." Although he never explicitly spelled out the contours of this pattern, he was clearly alluding to race baiting. Later in the day, Obama himself jumped in, repeating the nasty, slippery charge that the Clinton campaign "was trying to circulate this [picture] as a negative" and calling it a political trick of the sort "you start seeing at the end of campaigns." Although finally skewered, for the first time, on "Saturday Night Live" over the past weekend for its pro-Obama tilt, the press corps once again fell for this latest throw of the race-baiter card, turning the Drudge rumor into its number one story, obscuring Clinton's major national security address. In doing so, the media has confirmed what has been the true pattern in the race for the Democratic nomination--the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states' rights. It may strike some as ironic that the racializing should be coming from a black candidate's campaign and its supporters. But this is an American presidential campaign--and there is a long history of candidates who are willing to inflame the most deadly passions in our national life in order to get elected. Sadly, it is what Barack Obama and his campaign gurus have been doing for months--with the aid of their media helpers on the news and op-ed pages and on cable television, mocked by "SNL" as in the tank for Obama. They promise to continue until they win the nomination, by any means necessary.

ENOUGHT ALREADY !!! PLEASE.....

MY EYES ARE BLEEDING! I'M SEEING LETTERS, WORDS, SENTENCES AND PARAGRAPHS (NO--NOT THAT ONE)!! ALL COLLIDING, SWIRLING, PULSATING IN A PANOPTIC COLLAGE OF METAPHYSICAL BULL-SHIT !!

You, my friend, SERIOUSLY need to learn the elements of syntax and paragraph construction, or at the very least, the basics of HTML usage. You'd be doing all of us a great favor. In addition, your delusional, crazed, non-reality based parallelisms of Hillary-World and its evil, corrupt Obama-minions would TRULY be dangerous if not for two factors:

1) NOBODY'S GOING TO KNOW---b/c no one is going to sit there all afternoon and read your ill-formulated novel of Republican-Male, penis-envy based racial insecurities, and thinly disquised racist lies posing as YOUR version of historical accuracies......and

2) ONE NEED ONLY READ 1/5 OF IT..to know that the SHEER volume of PROVABLE fabrications and mis-readings of DOCUMENTABLE FACTS in just that portion alone is stunning; and it all but renders any reading beyond that point to one where picking ones nose becomes vastly more interesting, than this exercise of time-wasting prevarications.

You wrote, (among many illusional distortions):

"To a large degree, the campaign's (Obama's)strategists turned the primary and caucus race to their advantage when they deliberately, falsely, and successfully portrayed Clinton and her campaign as unscrupulous race-baiters--a campaign-within-the-campaign in which the worked-up flap over the Somali costume photograph is but the latest episode."

and:

"More than any other maneuver, this one has brought Clinton into disrepute with important portions of the Democratic Party. A review of what actually happened shows that the charges that the Clintons played the "race card" were not simply false; they were deliberately manufactured by the Obama camp and trumpeted by a credulous and/or compliant press corps in order to strip away her once formidable majority among black voters ..."

You wrote: "A review of what actually happened ..." fine, lets ACTUALLY REVIEW WHAT "ACTUALLY HAPPENED".....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G159v3LmHOw&eurl=http://www.bittervoters.org/2008/04/video-bill-clinton-tries-to-di.php
http://www.observer.com/2007/shaheen-brings-obamas-drug-use-didnt-care-much-about-gores
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1207/Shaheen_Did_Obama_sell_drugs.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtQxyaweiYQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbq9_g-WfFk&eurl=http://hiphop.popcrunch.com/bob-johnson-barack-obama-slam-video/
http://weblogs.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/blog/2008/01/ag_cuomo_on_nh_no_shuck_and_ji.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNPeG-WtXt4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqL_sm0J8jc&e
http://youtube.com/watch?v=do4GWkQx32A
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/08/mark-penn-reportedly-dumb_n_100809.html

I intentionally CHOSE more videos than quotes so you can review what "actually happened"....STRAIGHT from their own mouths, so as not to CONFUSE you with the "machinations" of Obama's camp "weaving" a spell over any of them and "forcing" them to utter statements they did not want to make! Additionally, NONE of these surrogates: not Johnson, Not Ferraro, not Cuomo, and certainly, not BILL CLINTON...stepped forth and issued these comments WITHOUT the MANDATE of the Clinton camp. (I won't even talk about Andy Young). Assuming I'm wrong, and they did this on their own, then one HAS to question the admin. or leadership capabilities of Hillary to have so many 'loose-cannons' destroying the campaign. NOW, which is it? I know, OBAMA called and made them do it!

This is, in microcosm, what is wrong with your either faulty historical recollections, or your flawed, bias, deluded prejudices, contained within these monstrous, monolithic rantings: besides, the FACT that it has ALREADY BEEN PROVEN by the SOURCE of this story, Drudge himself, who stated:

"CLINTON STAFFERS CIRCULATE 'DRESSED' OBAMA
Mon Feb 25 2008 06:51:00 ET"
http://drudgereport.com/flashoa.htm and:

"Drudge claims that Clinton’s team is circulating the pic, and the Obama campaign issued a statement working under the assumption that the Clinton campaign is responsible: “On the very day that Senator Clinton is giving a speech about restoring respect for America in the world, her campaign has engaged in the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election."
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/14688.html

TalkingPostMemo, HuffPost and many others have TOTALLY refuted your assertion that this was perpetrated by the Obama campaign. Its a rather simple task to (if one is willing) pursue simple truth. Not some tunnel-visioned, re-hashing of provable history. I think the one example is sufficient enough to get my point across, but, the same can be done about the ENTIRE body of your deceitful diatribe--you have taken what is, essentially, mere gossip, embedded within a bitter, self-pitying haranguing of Obama, and have tried to portray it as some sort of scholarly historical treatise of expostulations designed to convince us that Obama is as equally, if not more, morally depraved as your precious Hillary; with the idea being, we would be convinced of its profundity----if you bury it within a mountain of trivial minutiae--------I'M NOT.......and it didn't.

In a way, you're whats wrong with European/American studies of history; recent and otherwise. Its pseudo-scholars proclaiming themselves to be "experts", (as if this is the GREAT QUALIFIER that removes doubtful scrutiny of them), operating on many a Freudian hypotheses, have always recalibrated facts to give themselves, and by extension, the white race, a false sense of historical being, validity and accomplishment. Operating on the same functional premise--it is PRECISELY what you are doing here.

You think if you produce some massive, protracted, preponderate-looking tome of supposed 'depth' and volume, that it will not be subject to scrutable review. I beg to differ. You are only tendering what you THINK happened. A quick sampling is really all one needs to do to realize that, though voluminous, it is a piece vacuous, void, and lacking substance. It is, in truth, JUST YOUR WARPED OPINION. It has no true historical value or basis, and even IF it did, HOW WOULD WE KNOW? You CITE NOTHING! There is not one shred of supportable evidence to ANYTHING you purport. It is intellectually dishonest; a gaudy, garish garnering of garrulous equivocations, masquerading, by the sheer weight of its volume as some serious political commentary. It is not.

You write: " his campaign has purposefully polluted the contest with a new strain of what historically has been the most toxic poison in American politics..." prove it. Where is the evidence of this happening? Who brought it to your attention?

You write: "The Clinton campaign, in fact, has not racialized the campaign, and never had any reason to do so. Rather the Obama campaign and its supporters, well-prepared to play the "race-baiter card" before the primaries began..." On point one, I again, refer you my above cites. On point 2, where is the evidence of what their "game-plan" was BEFORE the primaries. HOW, (AND WHEN), did YOU come upon this "cosmic" wisdom?

You write: "Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama's supposedly uplifting campaign. Even before the first caucus met in Iowa, the Obama campaign was ready to play a similar game..." WHEN has this type of behavior EVER been displayed by ANYONE in the Obama camp? AND...if it happened, WHY hasn't the Clinton camp taken advantage of the gaffe? They have certainly pursued every other one?

I could on with more...but I think readers get my point. Further you go on to describe the events before, during, and after the Iowa and N.H. campaigns, along with a rambling account of the brief history of drug allegations in regards to various political camps; you even allude to the fact that you were/are possibly connected to, and part of, those events with Hill's camp; if so, I would assume, you're media savvy, or at least, exposed to it. Ergo, you should know enough to know that if you're going to go into a lengthy discourse of these things; CITING them, so they provide background proof that you VETTED them, is basic Journalism 101. WHO told you these things, or WHERE you uncovered them, ORare they merely drunken cocktail party repartee? If so, (I need to tell you about the bawdy time I had in Chicago in '96--). Otherwise, to do any thing LESS than that is either unprofessional, or makes you just plain lazy. Therefore making the validity and credibility of your entire screed---suspect.

Her own words did it from the beginning.

Hillary Clinton is now running as "The Great White Hope." Witness her most recent comments about her appeal -- and ONLY HER appeal to "Blue Collar White Voters." Check out HuffPost. The Supers need to end this now, before she completely divides the Democratic Party. People who were willing to give her "her space" need to say "enough." People who think it's "racist" for blacks to overwhelmingly vote for a black candidate --- need to stop and think. The Black community has supported the Democratic Party for decades. Up until now --- they never had anybody but white candidates to vote for, and they still supported the Democratic Party. Is it any surprise that they would register to vote in record numbers for the opportunity to FINALLY be able to vote for an Black nominee? Get a grip people. Hillary Clinton cannot be allowed to continue her campaign of racial divisiveness. It has to end NOW!

Race bating

I find that the less people have to say the longer it takes.Nothing more reliable than The Huffington Post.