Posted on 01/22/2008 5:24:26 AM PST by fweingart
"I guess this is how the West was won," Hillary Clinton exulted at her victory rally in Las Vegas after the Democratic caucuses.
Well, not exactly, ma'am. Yet how the Clintons, by deftly playing the race and gender cards, turned back the greatest single challenge to a Clinton Restoration will be studied for a long time to come.
It began in Iowa, where Barack Obama, the first African-American crossover candidate with broad appeal to all racial and ethnic groups, was on fire in a state that was overwhelmingly white.
Came then Billy Shaheen, the Clinton New Hampshire co-chair, to suggest that, were Barack to be nominated, Republicans would ask when he had stopped using drugs and whether he ever bought or sold drugs. Mark Penn of the Clinton campaign denied on MSNBC's "Hardball" that his team was raising the "cocaine issue."
Mission accomplished, Shaheen dutifully resigned. Bill Clinton drove the point home, telling an interviewer that to nominate Obama would be a "roll of the dice."
Nevertheless, Barack won Iowa going away and stormed into New Hampshire for what pundits predicted would be a defeat for Hillary so crushing it would be the final chapter of the Clinton era.
Then Bill Clinton told a Dartmouth audience that Obama's claim to being consistently antiwar was a "fairy tale."
That, plus the media pile-on, Barack's snide dismissal of her in the debate -- "You're popular enough, Hillary" -- and her choked-up moment hours before voting began caused the women of New Hampshire to rally in sympathy. Obama's lead, estimated by some at 15 points, vanished, and Hillary won what became one of the great upsets in New Hampshire history.
Stunned and stung, Barack's African-American backers then rushed into the baited trap. One after another, they headed for the TV cameras to charge that the Clintons had fought dirty, forcing voters to focus on the race and gender of the candidates rather than on their records, ideas and issues.
When Hillary said sweetly that while Dr. Martin Luther King was the inspirational leader of the civil rights revolution, LBJ was the indispensable leader who had enacted the laws, King, martyr-hero of black America, became an issue.
As the raillery grew acrimonious and the rage among Barack's backers rose, his black support solidified, but his white support, recoiling from race politics, peeled away. And the sisterhood rallied to Hillary.
Robert Johnson of Black Entertainment Television then stoked the fire once more, asserting that when Bill and Hillary were fighting for civil rights, Barack was in Chicago doing whatever he was doing in the neighborhoods. The implication: Barack was doing drugs, while Bill and Hillary marched. Denying malevolent intent, Johnson, too, apologized.
But the damage has been done. And reviewing the returns from Nevada and the polls in South Carolina, it may be irreversible. Barack is no longer a crossover candidate who transcends race. The color-blind coalition he seemed to be assembling appears to be coming apart.
His momentum is gone. The emotional movement that was Iowa has passed. The media are no longer smitten. And as African-Americans rally to him, Democratic women, a majority of the party, are rallying around Hillary.
Consider the stark Nevada returns. Though Barack used as the refrain of his concession speech in New Hampshire "Yes, we can!" -- the battle cry of Hispanics, "Si, se puede" -- though he was endorsed by the Culinary Workers Union, he lost Hispanics by nearly two to one.
Equally ominous, he lost both the white vote and the women's vote by the same three-to-two margin, while sweeping the African-American vote five to one. Once a candidate who happened to be black, Obama is now the black candidate.
This may be a portent of what is to come. With Hispanics, whites and women a huge majority of Democrats, Hillary should sweep a majority of states in the Southwest and the West, including Texas and California, where African-Americans are relatively few in number and Hispanics are many.
If Barack loses South Carolina, he is cooked, as the Clintonites have made him the favorite. Even if he carries South Carolina, it will be written off as black folks coming out for a native son.
Folks will look instead at how well, or badly, he does among whites. If Hillary and Edwards crush him among white voters, the message will be that the Democratic Party will risk ruin if it nominates an African-American who has shown little appeal among whites and even less among Hispanics. For whites and Hispanics are the swing votes in presidential politics.
In three weeks, Barack has been ghettoized. The crossover candidate, the great liberal hope, has become a Jesse Jackson, who is ceded the black vote and a few states, then given a speaking role at the convention, as the party moves on to the serious business of electing a president.
One cannot deny that Bill Clinton was right. Nominating Barack would be a "roll of the dice." But nor can one deny that Bill and Hillary helped make sure the risk would be one the party would not take.
That Billy. He uses such colorful and illustrative examples.
Most of us here believe that the DemocRAT ticket will be: Clinton/Obama.
Where is our candidate? Where is our conservative? The only one that even looks like a conservative is Fred Thompson and someone had better set his trousers on fire.
I’m not so sure Obama would take the number 2 spot on the Dim ticket. Under normal circumstances I would say that it would make sense. However, whoever is the VP on the Dim ticket will always be overshadowed by slick wille. billy boy will not let himself be upstaged by the VP-regardless of who that is.
is it me or is the media doing something with Obama’s skin tones? He was positively green in some clips last night, and almost white in others. are they doing something to soften his color?
****I’m not so sure Obama would take the number 2 spot on the Dim ticket.***
When the Clinton-owned franchise - AKA the Democratic Party pulls off Hellery’s nomination - Obama should take a stand for integrity and do a Lieberman.
The Clintonoids will NEVER let a Black guy beat them....NEVER!! Barak’s mother won’t recognize her son when the Clintons get finished with him.....WAKE UP BLACKS!!
Political correctness came about not because there was a need for it or that people’s speech was inciting hate -
It was the Liberal left’s way of silencing the right by shame and ostrization.
However now they find themselves in a pickle. They have used political correctness to the extreme for so long they never thought that it might be used against them.
If a conservative black man was running for President, race would only be an issue by the radical blacks such as Jesse Jackson. They would be saying his is an oreo, an Uncle Tom, not black enough - everything they stated about Clarence Thomas.
It is fun to watch them eat their words and have to allow anything that Obama says to be OK and anything that Hillary says to be questions.
Probably anothr negro other than Obama.
Who?
She’s going to go with Webb or Bayh. She needs to give the appearance that she’s “moderate”. She doesn’t need to put a black VP on the ticket. The Dems have the black vote sewn up.
“Mission accomplished, Shaheen dutifully resigned. Bill Clinton drove the point home, telling an interviewer that to nominate Obama would be a “roll of the dice.””
I bet they sat all night thinking up that one.
What next.... Voting for Obama is like drinking a 40 and smoking a blunt?
“Most of us here believe that the DemocRAT ticket will be: Clinton/Obama.”
I don’t agree... I think most people know the Clinton ego to well for that. For Hillary, Obama is now little more than scum under her boot. I predict her VP nominee will be a moderate, maybe even a Republican... Perhaps one who speaks respectfully of her, and who asked John Kerry for the role of VP in 2004.
No they’re just causing his appearance to be continually altered like his favorite serpent: the cameleon.
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