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How Obama
played the race card and blamed Hillary.
Sean Wilentz, The New Republic Published:
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
After several weeks of swooning, news reports
are finally being filed about the gap between
Obama's promises of a pure, soul-cleansing "new"
politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest
conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But
it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by
the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation
of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial
Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as
the manipulative illusion that it is.
Most of the recent correctives have concerned
outrageously deceptive advertisements approved
and released by Obama's campaign. First, in Iowa,
the Obama camp aired radio ads patterned on
the notorious "Harry and Louise" Republican propaganda
from 1993, charging falsely that Hillary's
health care proposal would "force those who cannot
afford health insurance to buy it, punishing those
who won't fall in line." In subsequent primary
and caucus campaigns, the Obama campaign sent out
millions of mailers, also featuring the "Harry
and Louise" motif, falsely claiming that Clinton favored
"punishing families who can't afford health care
in the first place." A few bloggers and columnists,
notably Paul Krugman in The New York Times, described
the ads as distorting, but the national
press corps mainly ignored them--until Clinton
herself, seeing the fraudulent mailers reappear in
Ohio over the past weekend, publicly denounced
them.
The Obama mass mailings also attempt to appeal
to Ohio's labor vote by claiming that Clinton believed
that NAFTA, signed in 1993 by President Bill
Clinton, was a "'boon' to our economy." More falsehood:
In fact, Clinton had not said that; Newsday originally
applied the word "boon" and has now noted the
Obama campaign's distortion. In this campaign,
Clinton has called for a moratorium on all trade agreements
until they are made consistent with labor and
environmental standards--and account for the effect on jobs in
the United States. Obama makes a big deal about
how Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. But he fails to mention that,
within the councils of her husband's administration,
Hillary was a skeptic of free trade agreements, and as a
senator and candidate she has said that NAFTA
contained flaws that need to be rectified. Ignoring all that,
the Obama flyer features an alarming photograph
of closed plant gates, having no connection to any action of
Senator Clinton's, as well as the dubious quotation
about her from Newsday in 2006. Newsday has criticized
"Obama's use of the quotation" as "misleading
... an example of the kind of slim reeds campaigns use to try and
win an office." Obama, without retracting the
mailing (and while playing to protectionist sentiment in the party)
said only that he would have his staff look into
the matter--long after the ad has done its dirty work.
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.
II.
Readers of Philip Roth's award-winning novel,
The Human Stain, will be familiar with the race-baiter card
and its uses, but so will anyone who has been
exposed to the everyday tensions that can arise from the
volatile mixture of race and politics. In Roth's
novel, a college professor loses his job and his reputation
after he asks one of his classes whether two
African American students who have regularly been absent
are "spooks." The context of the professor's
remarks make it clear that he used the term to mean "ghosts"
or "specters" and intended no racial disparagement--but
that makes not the slightest difference, as his enemies
on the faculty fan the argument that he is a
blatant and incorrigible race-baiter who can no longer be trusted
to teach young minds. An innocent remark becomes
a hateful one when pulled through the prism of ideology,
ill will, and emotional exploitation. One day,
Roth's professor (who, ironically, turns out to be a black man
passing as white) is a respected, even revered
member of the faculty; then the race baiter card gets played,
and his career is suddenly destroyed.
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,
Rep. 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. Rep. 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.
Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New
Republic, and the author of
The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to
Lincoln (Norton).
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