Right now for those of you with the mainstream media too 'inside' your heads, you're likely living the lie that somehow it was Hillary and Bill who played the race card and innocent Obama who has repeatedly been the victim, and that the 'liberal' media, radio and blogosphere have heroically come to the rescue of racism victim Obama. Because it's so overwhelmingly the preferred narrative, I assume that media lie will actually slime its way into 'pop histories' and then real histories of the campaign. Despite the actual reality, the South Carolina chapter well told here (I've highlighted where the 'race card' playing started):
. . . Obama himself prepared the ground [for the media's all out assumption of Clinton evil intent no matter how innocuous the actual statements] by making the first gratuitous personal attack of the campaign during the televised Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate in South Carolina on 21 January, although virtually every follower of the media coverage now assumes that it was Clinton who started the negative attacks. Following routine political sniping from her about supposedly admiring comments Obama had made about Ronald Reagan, Obama suddenly turned on Clinton and stared intimidatingly at her. "While I was working in the streets," he scolded her, ". . . you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart." Then, cleverly linking her inextricably in the public consciousness with her husband, he added: "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes."One of his female staff then distributed a confidential memo to carefully selected journalists which alleged that a vaguely clumsy comment Hillary Clinton had made about Martin Luther King ("Dr King's dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964") and a reference her husband had made in passing to Nelson Mandela ("I've been blessed in my life to know some of the greatest figures of the last hundred years . . . but if I had to pick one person whom I know would never blink, who would never turn back, who would make great decisions . . . I would pick Hillary") were deliberate racial taunts.
Another female staffer, Candice Tolliver - whose job it is to promote Obama to African Americans - then weighed in publicly, claiming that "a cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements" and saying: "Folks are beginning to wonder: Is this an isolated situation, or is there something bigger behind all of this?" That was game, set and match: the Clintons were racists, an impression sealed when Bill Clinton later compared Obama's victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988 (even though Jackson himself, an Obama supporter, subsequently declared Clinton's remarks to be entirely inoffensive).
The pincer movement, in fact, could have come straight from a textbook on how to wreck a woman's presidential election campaign: smear her whole persona first, and then link her with her angry, red-faced husband. The public Obama, characteristically, pronounced himself "unhappy" with the vilification carried out so methodically by his staff, but it worked like magic: Hillary Clinton's approval ratings among African Americans plummeted from above 80 per cent to barely 7 per cent in a matter of days, and have hovered there since.
I suspect that, as a result, she will never be able entirely to shake off the "racist" tag. [So, Dem hierarchy, faggedabout 2012 (assuming Obama loses in 2008) even if Hillary would be the Dems' best chance for a winner, she's toast.] "African-American super-delegates [who are supporting Clinton] are being targeted, harassed and threatened," says one of them, Representative Emanuel Cleaver. "This is the politics of the 1950s." Obama and Axelrod have achieved their objectives: to belittle Hillary Clinton and to manoeuvre the ever-pliant media into depicting every political criticism she makes against Obama as racist in intent.
The danger is that, in their headlong rush to stop the first major female candidate (aka "Hildebeast" and "Hitlery") from becoming president, the punditocracy may have landed the Democrats with perhaps the least qualified presidential nominee ever. . . .
http://www.newstatesman.com/north-americ a/2008/05/obama-clinton-vote-usa-media
Nonetheless, by the way (and disagreeing with where the Statesman dude goes from that point forward) Obama has an excellent chance of winning against McCain, who is the least young presidential nominee ever, and who stands to reap the ill wind blowing toward the Bush-Cheney cabal and its Iraq/Afghanistan quagmires and tanking economy.
Thanks for finding the Statesman link, SPK at http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/5/23/1128 21/681
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