Campaign has one too many Clintons - Democratic Underground

CatWoman

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Wed Jan-30-08 03:55 PM
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Campaign has one too many Clintons

In this time of strife among Democrats, it’s good to know that so many of the nation’s deepest political thinkers have the party’s interests at heart.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan laments that “the Clintons are tearing the party apart. It will not be the same after this.” True, the same column contends that “George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party,” but that’s for another day. In The Washington Post, Robert Novak warns that the primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “is fraught with peril for the Democratic party coalition because it threatens to alienate its essential African American component.”

That would break Novak’s adamantine heart. On MSNBC, the brows of former Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough and one-time “morality czar” (and casino habitué ) Bill Bennett are permanently furrowed. On the same network, virtually every pundit who discussed the South Carolina primary did so in racial, or, if you prefer, demographic, terms. The Washington Post’s estimable African American columnist Eugene Robinson started on the evening of the New Hampshire primary. He wondered aloud if Clinton’s surprise victory resulted from the “Bradley effect,” i. e., white voters speaking well of a black candidate, but yielding to racist impulses in the darkness of the voting booth.

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Harkening to a theme that pundits had pushed since New Hampshire, MSNBC broke down South Carolina’s exit polls by race even before actual results came in. Every newspaper account I read stressed Obama’s winning 80 percent of the African American vote.

On TV, the usual talking heads—Chris Matthews, Howard Fineman, Margaret Carlson et al. —were partying like it was January 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky story broke and the Clinton presidency was presumed DOA. So somebody sticks a camera in Bill’s face, asks him an insulting question, and he reminds them that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary twice, but never the nomination.

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That set off racial sensitivity alarms throughout the media and even certain normally more sensible precincts of the liberal blogosphere. Bill Clinton had played the race card ! Hands were wrung. Lamentations filled the air. Because as we all know, Jackson (who supports Obama ) exists in only one dimension, blackness; therefore, any / all references to his political career constitute bigotry. Everybody else can spend hours parsing racial demographics, but not Bill Clinton. Except Jackson himself didn’t object. Neither did Obama.

I’m with Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford, who told Joe Scarborough: “I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney, he ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club.... e’ve gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if you try to say, ‘Well, where’s the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign ?’ you’re accused of being a naïve shill for the Clintons.”

But I’d also say this: Somebody needs to put the Big Dog back on the porch. His attacks on Obama are unbecoming in a former president; people are tired of the Clinton melodrama; and the bigger he looms, the smaller Hillary looks.

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/215251/print/