Let’s be honest here. The Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama are designed to do one thing, make his skin color an issue. Barack Obama was able to win Iowa and place a strong second in NH without his race ever becoming an issue. The more race becomes an issue, the better it is for Hillary.
How did the Clinton’s make race an issue? Like all dishonest, sleezy politicians do, though their surrogates, of course. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson had a terrific column on this back on the 17th,
If Hillary Clinton’s campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern, with Clinton’s former New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Representative Charles Rangel, Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act.
Surrogates don’t take printed instructions, but neither do they want to upset the candidate they’ve traveled to the hinterlands to please. And Penn isn’t even a surrogate. He’s the campaign’s top strategist.
Carlson continues, making the essential point,
For Obama, he lost the essence of his candidacy as the first black man to run as himself. Once the race card is on the table, no matter who puts it there, it’s impossible to put it back up anyone’s sleeve. Obama may look back on the first two weeks of 2008 as the time when he lost the nomination to Clinton.
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson absolutely nails the reason behind the Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama,
Obama’s candidacy not only threatens to obliterate the dream of a Clinton Restoration. It also fundamentally calls into question Bill Clinton’s legacy by making it seem . . . not really such a big deal. That, I believe, is the unforgivable insult.
The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that Bill and Hillary Clinton should have been relegated to the ash heap of history a long time ago. Their behavior while in the White House was nothing short of disgraceful. Forget Monica for a minute. How about the White House coffee fundraisers, pimping out the Lincoln bedroom, savagely attacking women who credibly accused the president of harassment, all the while complaining about the politics of personal destruction. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. When nobody, and I mean nobody, in the Democratic Party stood up to these two, before, during and after his impeachment, I knew I could never again support a Democrat. Some things are bigger than holding on to power at all costs. The Democrat establishment chose to not just support, but hero worship the Clinton’s, especially Bill. How many “good government†types had to look the other way? How many alleged feminists turned their backs on everything they believed to support these two? The Clinton’s represent the complete intellectual and moral collapse of the Democratic Party. I will never understand why some party leaders didn’t tell him it was time to leave when they had the chance. Al Gore would have taken over, and been able to run in 2000 as the president, and not the VP who was too embarrassed to have the POTUS campaign for him. Could President Al Gore beat George W. Bush? We’ll never know.
What is it going to take for Democrats to learn that the Clinton’s and their win at all costs mentality have damaged the party immensely?
An editorial in today’s WSJ titled The Education of Barack Obama (subs req’d) gets to the heart of who the Clinton’s are, and it isn’t pretty,
The Illinois Senator is still a young man, but not so young as to have missed the 1990s. He nonetheless seems to be awakening slowly to what everyone else already knows about the Clintons, which is that they will say and do whatever they “gotta” say or do to win. Listen closely to Mr. Obama, and you can almost hear the echoes of Bob Dole at the end of the 1996 campaign asking, “Where’s the outrage?”
Barack Obama is still learning who the Clinton’s are and what they value most. It is not country, or even party, but power. If the Clinton’s are allowed to cynically use race to destroy the first legitimate black candidate for president, will the Democrat Party continue to say “thank you sir, may I have another”?
Earth to Democrats: the Clinton’s are poison. When are you going to wake up?