The issue of race has been thrust to the forefront since Iowa. Dick Morris has written ten days ago on how this is the doing of the Clinton's. The strategy is to ghettoize Obama, as Mickey Kaus has written.
Dick Morris wrote this three days ago:
Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination. The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large. They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. — an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go.
By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama’s, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue. Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle. Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he’s going to lose? Precisely because he is going to lose it.
If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.
Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing.
Here's the play-by-play from the London Times:
During the Iowa caucuses there was a lot of sniping in Hillaryland, the close-knit world of her female confidantes, about Bill stealing her limelight and going off-message. But shaken by her humiliating third-place defeat, Hillary turned to Bill – always her closest adviser – to save her. Together they rounded on Obama’s lack of experience and Bill launched into the “fairy-tale” of Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war.
The issue of race soon followed, with Hillary patronising Obama in debate as a “talented” and “young African-American man” and Bill belittling South Carolina voters by saying he would understand if they chose Obama over Hillary for reasons of racial “pride” – while disingenuously accusing Obama and his aides of being the first to inject race into the campaign.
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and author of a new book about the Democratic party’s checkered history of racism, said: “Hillary and Bill and their surrogates have been pushing the limits of what you can get away with saying in a public sphere. If they were Republicans, they’d be crucified.” The effect, he added, was to turn Obama into “the 2008 version of Jesse Jackson”, with the white vote deserting him.
Obama is often contrasted with Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for the White House twice in the 1980s, for aiming to be president of all America as opposed to president of “black” America. Yet he could end up with little more to show for his campaign once the Clintons have finished with him. It is largely forgotten that in the 1988 White House race, Jackson won 11 primaries and caucuses as the “minority” candidate, including his home state of South Carolina, industrial Michigan and predominantly white Vermont.
I continue to amaze myself with my own naivete. I had considered the last week or so to be a terrible one for Hillary. I was impressed with her Meet the Press appearance after NH. She went after Obama's soft spot, his claim that he offers superior judgment than her, when in fact he's just as much a political animal.
But is he? The Clinton's placement of personal ambition above all else is breathtaking. They are burning down this village in order to save it. I was informed by an erstwhile contributer to this blog that the race strategy was conscious on the part of the Clinton's. How naive for me to think otherwise. The whole idea that the Clinton's could be misinterpreted, and the discussion turned in a direction they didn't want as a result could never, never happen. They're too disciplined.
To that erstwhile contributer: post when you find something that will shake me out of my dogmatic slumber doggone it!!!!
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