January 23, 2008--35 Years of Experience

Here’s what 35 years of experience have taught the (plural) Clintons: that as long as it suits their personal interests (power, public adulation, greed) it’s permissible.

This has been on full flagrant display the past two weeks.

Shamelessly, just before and during the long weekend set aside to celebrate the achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr., they and their surrogates launched an intentional campaign of race-bating. We all are aware of the specifics—unashamedly they trivialized King’s role in bringing about Civil Rights legislation in order to reduce Barack Obama’s stature while elevating Hillary’s.

In addition to what Hillary Clinton said, one of the Clintons’ leading supporters, Harlem’s Congressman Charles Rangel said: “How race got into this thing is because Obama said ‘race.’ For him to suggest that Dr. King could have signed this act [it was in fact Hillary who said that] is absolutely stupid. It’s absolutely dumb to infer that Dr. King, alone, passed the legislation and signed it into law.” Again, Rangel’s got the wrong person in his sights. (See NY Times article linked below.)

They had others echo Rush Limbaugh’s slander that Barack Hussein Obama is a closet Moslem (the esteemed president of the New School Bob Kerry, took on that role) or that he was a drug dealer (Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist, served as the assassin for this one).

And then the Clintons themselves finished the job by patronizing Obama during the MLK celebrations by in effect patting him on the head while saying how “proud” they were that this “young man” is a strong candidate for the presidency. Why should they take personal pride in this? Isn’t that for when you have actually accomplished something? And all that emphasis on his youth is more than calling his experience and readiness into question—it’s one small step away from calling him boy.

And now that they have, what else, turned this election into one about race, in the first state where there is a significant black population (South Carolina), they have unveiled a two-part racial strategy—leave the “first black president” and his daughter to campaign there (being prepared to say if Obama wins in SC on Saturday that it was because they [wink, wink] voted for him); while Hillary Clinton is out in California and Arizona looking for support within the Hispanic community, taking open advantage of the sad historical fact that Latinos have not in the past been comfortable supporting African-American candidates.

This cynical strategy is apparently working. In the recent Democratic candidates debate, it was obvious that Bill and Hillary Clinton had managed to drag Obama down to their own level. They got him to attack her as aggressively as they had been smearing him. It was all designed to say:

You’re just like us--a politician out for your own personal gain. Willing to say and do anything. How do you like it down here with us in the mud? That’s where we’ve been for 35 years while you’ve been riding your high horse, going to Harvard, writing your books, playing Holier than Thou, and talking about Hope. It’s not about hope, boy, it’s about winning.