Clintons About To Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine
A bad autumn looks to turn into a catastrophic winter for Hillary Clinton. After attempting to distract people from her stumbling campaign by launching a series of attacks on Barack Obama -- and having them backfire -- Hillary promised to take the high road in the future. That promise may have come too late for the pundit class, which has begun to question whether the Clintons intended to use racial stereotypes to frighten Democrats away from Obama:
Ever since Barack Obama began to pierce the inevitability that we were told surrounded the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, I've wondered how the Clintonistas would react. Now we know: not well. ....But could it be that this story is even worse than many in the national press will say? Isn't it interesting that Shaheen, or whoever is behind this, opted to invoke the image of a drug dealer in referencing the first top-tier black candidate for president? That's quite a coincidence. This wouldn't be an ugly Willie Horton-type tactic intended to harvest fear and play on stereotypes about who is a criminal and who isn't, or -- in this case -- who uses drugs and who sells them?
Nah. Liberal Democrats would never sink that low. Why if they did, how could they continue to package themselves as a kinder and gentler -- and more enlightened -- alternative to Republicans? Certainly not with a straight face.
Ruben Navarette nails this one. Had a Republican raised the spectre of drug dealing, Democrats would have screamed "racial politics" faster than anyone could say Lee Atwater. Critics may have had a point, too. Obama has already done more than Bill Clinton would do in admitting his teenage drug use, scoffing at the notion of not inhaling. However, no one has ever produced any evidence that Obama dealt drugs as well as consumed them.
After all, no Republican campaign insinuated that Bill Clinton dealt drugs after his half-hearted admission about using marijuana. They ridiculed his "I didn't inhale" mitigation, but no one has insinuated that he turned on little kids to support a habit. As much evidence exists for that charge as it does with Obama -- none -- but Shaheen, an experienced campaign operative, had no hesitation in dropping that little bomb.
Bill Clinton got a lot of mileage out of the notion of being the nation's "first black president", but undoubtedly he has built strong ties to the African-American community. Hillary needs that support if she expects to win the nomination, let alone the general election. However, if she and Bill start using subtle and not-so-subtle attacks against Obama that invoke racial stereotypes, those ties will almost certainly start to unknot themselves, leaving Hillary in a free-fall. And if their campaign shows what we can expect from a 2008 run, then she deserves the drop.
UPDATE: On the other hand, could the Clintons get some traction on this in Iowa?
An elderly man told Edwards that “something has been sticking in my craw” and explained that “a certain fella committed two murders in California and the jury found him not guilty. And all they said was, ‘It’s payback time.’ How are you going to have that come out in this election to combat one of your competitors?”Edwards seemed puzzled, as most people in the audience seemed to be.
Read the whole thing, and pray that this idiot is an outlier. Edwards at least handled it passably well, but a stronger denunciation would have been better.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on December 17, 2007 4:31 PM | Comments () | TrackBacks (1)
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