clintons stir up race to win

man, the longer this thing goes the more i just hate the clintons. my friend holly explained the other day that she heard that the clintons were stirring up race in an effort to make obama the "black" candidate. she said that the thinking is that if he is just kinda a novelty thing, like "how cool would it be to have a black president", people then won't take him seriously for his ideas, passion, leadership. they will be able to be seen as serious and he will just be quaint. plus, if hillary can be the woman's president she can get soccer moms to the polls and win.

she also explained that bill is loosing it on the press regularly because "hillary can't". apparently the feeling is, hillary MUST be seen as nice. she can be tough, but she MUST be nice. bill is able to do just about anything. and so he is being crazy and rude because hillary can't do anything close to mean. because bill is a former president, anything he does gets press. and the press fall for it. so it just keeps the hillary campaign in the news. they are betting that the more you see of bill, the more you will long for the days when he was president, and you will vote for hillary in effect to get him back too.

it made sense, but i couldn't see why the clintons would work so hard to start dividing the dems? the dems winning the election is not a given and dividing the dems might mean we loose the election. they wouldn't do that. would they? do they want the power and the house back so much that they will sacrafice everything? i think the answer is yes.

and now there are more people saying exactly what holly said...

January 23, 2008

Playing the race card

Posted by Mark Kleiman

Well, this one wasn't hard to call, though I'd expected a little bit more subtlety:

Bill Clinton: Race, gender key in S.C.

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer

DILLON, S.C. - Bill Clinton said Wednesday he expects blacks to vote for Barack Obama and women to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the dynamic may cause his wife to lose the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary Saturday.

Racist? You tell me. The message is clear: Obama is going to win South Carolina, but that won't really count, because he'll be doing it with the votes of black folks. (Maybe those ballots ought to count only as 3/5ths of a vote each?)

The basic fact of the contest is that if it becomes racial, Obama loses, while if it becomes gendered, HRC wins. It would have required patriotism, decency, and attention to the paramount goal of beating the Republicans for the Clintons to refrain from playing the race card. Apparently those qualities are in short supply.

Update A pro-Clinton reader furiously accuses me of inventing the racist edge to Bill Clinton's remarks. So let's hear from his old adviser (and Trent Lott's), Dick Morris, who is surely an expert on the workings of Bill Clinton's mind and on the political uses of racial prejudice:

How Clinton Will Win The Nomination by Losing South Carolina

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.