The Clinton's are already resorting to the race card and, because of Obama's incredible momentum, it has become transparent and it's already backfiring with an electorate who won't get drawn into their manipulations or a Democratic civil war.
Frank Rich, New York Times, wrote yesterday that Hillary Clinton's most senior advisers are in a state of "panic" about her presidential prospects and are plotting to enlist Democrat leaders in Congress to thwart her rival Barack Obama's ambitions ~ which includes the race card.
Excerpt: " In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), "the black candidate" (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).... The result ? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote ..Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have "not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates." Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was "making a historical statement.... It wasn't an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists ... As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times ~ If that was the intent, it didn't work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut "
The Clinton's will not go quietly into the political night and will do anything to gain power and that includes playing the race card by pitting blacks against whites and Hispanics ~ even at the expense of splitting the party, alienating the country and possibly losing the election.
Allen L Roland
Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10rich.html?
Sunday 10 February 2008
What if a presidential candidate held what she billed as "the largest, most interactive town hall in political history" on national television, and no one noticed?
The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton's elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.
The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored "Voices Across America: A National Town Hall." The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like the scripted " Ask President Bush" sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions ("What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?") merely cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance out.
But I'm glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled programming (a movie promising "A Season for Miracles," aptly enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What's more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, or the endgame to come.
Click on http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10rich.html? for the remainder of Frank Rich's article.
Allen L Roland
