Asked by Bill O'Reilly's last week how she feels when she hears people like Rev. Wright say the ugly things he does about America and seeing people stand up and cheer in response (including to the notion that HIV was created to kill off black people) Hillary Clinton answered that she was very offended by it.
But the base level of humanity that Jeremiah Wright plays to is exactly what the Clintons have played to for 16 years. These are precisely the anti-American, racially divisive attitudes that both Clintons always helped foment, with Wright being no more than a single notch over the top of the Clintons. Bill and Hillary Clinton were the original Jeremiah Wright. Obama is merely "stealing" their base base.
As the editor of the new humor book Clintonisms, I'm fresh off of researching several decades' worth of Clinton quotes and can therefore refresh Americans' memories about this pair of Sharpton/Jackson facsimiles.
Here is Hillary Clinton addressing a mostly black audience last June:
If HIV/AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country!
And there was this beauty from both Clintons concerning the Amadou Diallo shooting:
If it had been a young white man, in a young all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn't have happened.
-- Bill Clinton at a fundraiser in California on March 3, 2000
[Many minorities] do believe, if Amadou had been a white man in an all-white neighborhood, he would still be alive...Too many people are considered suspect because of the color of their skin.
-- Hillary Clinton, March 5, 2000 at Riverside Church in uptown Manhattan
(What was that Hillary was telling Obama about not borrowing speeches?)
And here was a gem from Bill Clinton at a Georgetown University speech talking about terrorism, just two months after 9/11:
First of all, terror...has a very long history. Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights...And even today we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.
Meanwhile, some folks are noting that Obama alters his dialect to the "blacker" when speaking to black audiences. What's interesting is that if Billary was the 'first black president', here Obama is merely being a second Billary. Because look who else altered her dialect when speaking to a black church:
Hillary tried an impression of a black preacher and it was clunky and embarrassing. Even to my British ear I could tell that the Southern twang was phony.
-- Tony Harnden, March 5, 2007 UK Telegraph blog "Hillary: Civil Rights Struggle was for Me"