James Clyburn Happy to Play His Familiar Part Once More
Once again -- and for the last time -- the Democratic primary campaign has moved into a southern state, North Carolina, with a large African American population as well as a considerable university and college town liberal vote. Once again, the Barack Obama campaign and its supporters, fresh from a stinging defeat, are trying to stir up false accusations that Hillary Clinton and her campaign have cynically injected racial animosities into the campaign.
The latest round of charges about the Clintons have come from a familiar source, Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking black leader in Congress. In January, after the Obama campaign suffered stunning defeats in New Hampshire and Nevada, Rep. Clyburn, although nominally uncommitted, joined a chorus of concerted complaint about Hillary Clinton's supposed denigration of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his contributions to the 1964 Civil Rights Act because of her observation that President Lyndon Johnson had played a crucial part in guiding its passage. (Clinton's actual remarks, rarely reported, praised King enormously and were historically accurate.)
Clyburn then jumped on flimsy accusations that former President Bill Clinton had supposedly made subtle racial remarks by calling Obama's claim to unwavering opposition to administration policy in Iraq a "fairy tale," and by likening Obama's eventual victory in South Carolina to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. (The first had nothing whatsoever to do with race: Obama had said in 2004, 2005 and 2006 that he didn't know how he would have voted on Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq because as a state senator he had no access to the intelligence, and Obama voted consistently for war funding as a U.S. senator. On the second matter -- again, rarely reported in full -- Bill Clinton's remark was delivered as part of his praise of Obama's campaign in every state, and Jackson himself publicly deemed it inoffensive.) Clinton had apparently done his wife's campaign a lot of good with his work in New Hampshire and Nevada; but the targeted attack on him had the double effect of marginalizing him while advancing the race-baiter charges.
The Obama campaign had already begun injecting race into the campaign, notably on the morning after the New Hampshire primary, when its national co-chair, Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois, went on national television to accuse Senator Clinton of false emotion and racial intent in her tearful description of her commitment to public service. "Those tears also have to be analyzed," said Obama's co-chair. "They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs. Clinton did not cry for." And then Jackson added, disclosing his underlying political agenda: "Particularly as we head to South Carolina where 45% of African-Americans who participate in the Democratic contest." Clyburn immediately followed up, upping the ante by ripping into Bill Clinton and telling him to "chill." At the same time, an official Obama South Carolina campaign memo surfaced, which specified innocuous statements by Clinton supporters that could be twisted into race-baiting remarks -- including the wild claim, built from distorted quotations that Bill Clinton had said his wife was "stronger" than Nelson Mandela.
The charges leveled at the Clintons by Clyburn and others in South Carolina began what has become a completely predictable pattern among Obama, his campaign, and their supporters. First, Obama loses primary campaigns in key states which he had either expected to win (as in New Hampshire and then Nevada) or had worked desperately hard to win (as in Pennsylvania, where he outspent Hillary Clinton by as much as three-to-one). Then, as the campaign moved southward -- to Louisiana and then the "Potomac" primaries following Super Tuesday, to Mississippi following the March 4 Ohio and Texas primaries, and now to North Carolina -- come the furious but false charges, reported in the press as undeniable truths, that the Clinton campaign has indulged in mean-spirited race baiting, as a prelude to upcoming contests in southern states.
Some of these claims have turned out to be hoaxes, such as the release by the campaign, in the aftermath of Super Tuesday, of a supposedly scurrilous photograph of Obama in native African garb. Posted on the Drudge Report and lifted, as it turned out, from another right-wing website, Free Republic, where it initially surfaced, the appearance of the photograph was nevertheless blamed on the Clinton campaign by Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe who called it "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election." (Obama himself, after dismissing the incident in a public debate with Hillary Clinton, returned to the accusation while on the stump with black voters in Mississippi.)
On other occasions, Obama suggested to mostly black audiences, in coded racial terms, that the Clintons were attempting to confuse them with their criticisms of him. Before the South Carolina, "Potomac" and Mississippi primaries, Obama cheerfully lifted the "hoodwinked, bamboozled" rant from the Spike Lee film Malcolm X, in order to convey to black voters that, whatever he might say about a "post-racial" campaign, racial solidarity against white traducers was crucial to his effort. Denzel Washington, playing Malcolm X, says: "I'm gonna tell you like it really is. Every election year these politicians are sent up here to pacify us! They're sent here and set up here by the white man! I say and I say it again, you've been had. You've been took. You've been HOODWINKED, BAMBOOZLED, led astray, run amok." Barack Obama repeatedly echoed: "Don't be hoodwinked! Don't be bamboozled!"
Other claims have either been either outright fabrications or hysterical distortions: false charges leveled by one popular pro-Obama website, Daily Kos, that the Clinton campaign "blackened" their candidate to make his look menacing by purposely darkening a another photograph of him; and the strained Geraldine Ferraro fracas, in which an awkward remark buried in the Torrance, California Daily Breeze was trumpeted nationally by prominent Obama supporters such as Keith Olbermann of MSNBC's Countdown into accusations said that the Clinton campaign had descended into the politics of a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. Then there was the false claim by one of Obama's best known supporters in academia, Orlando Patterson of Harvard, published on the op-ed page of the New York Times, that there was no black child in Clinton's "3 a.m." television ad on national security, a supposedly racist move worthy of D. W. Griffith and Birth of a Nation -- when, in fact, there was a black child in that commercial.
Which brings us back to Representative Clyburn, on the eve of North Carolina, which some have called Obama's firewall state -- a state he must win convincingly in order to head off his latest slide in the primary race. Last week, Bill Clinton belatedly observed that the Obama campaign "played the race card on me" in South Carolina, and cited a conversation he had had with Jesse Jackson to prove his point. Clyburn jumped back in, getting the attention of The New York Times by charging that "black people are incensed" at Clinton and claiming that it is "an almost 'unanimous' view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton are "committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win." Clyburn may well be correct about perceptions of the Clintons among some black voters; but he simply hides how Obama, his campaign, and their supporters have willfully created that impression.
Remarkably, reports about the Clintons' alleged race-baiting have been reproduced so often and so uncritically in the press that they have attained the status of incontrovertible truth. Evidence and arguments to the contrary can expect either to be ignored (with their arguments dismissed, as Ryan Lizza recently and sarcastically did in The New Yorker, as "mysterious"). Or they can expect to be greeted by ad hominem attacks which do not engage the evidence, and which can even stray (as I have learned directly) into attacks on the author as a racist -- the sort who, back in 1860, sneered at Abraham Lincoln as a "Black Republican." There is no honest dialogue on this issue: only constant reiteration by Obama's supporters of the undeniable truth of the charges against the Clintons, and the personal disparaging of any who dare call the charges into question.
Yet, there are, to be sure, some stray signs that the press may be catching on to what is going on here. After Rep. Clyburn's latest tirade, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times -- who has until now been consistently anti-Clinton and pro-Obama -- raised an eyebrow in her column about Clyburn's endorsement of what Dowd called the "Tonya Harding conspiracy theory," that the Clintons and their supporters were out to destroy Obama by the foulest of means. And playing the race-baiter card runs the enormous risk of deepening the racial divide that will make it more difficult for Obama to appeal to white voters, as it has in the past.
But there may not be time for the Obama campaign to worry about that, given the Pennsylvania results, given the possible outcomes in Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky, and given the growing perception (deepened by the continuing outbursts by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) that Obama may not be electable in November. Incensing black voters in North Carolina -- as well as college and university liberals in the Chapel Hill-Durham area -- would be one way to gain the large majority that Obama needs to regain his footing. And so, yet again, the by now routine charges against the Clintons as race-baiters reappear -- with Representative Clyburn of neighboring South Carolina happy to play his by now familiar part once more.
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Wow, so you really think Clyburn is making this stuff up? I think you should check out Warren Ballentine or Al Sharpton's show TODAY. You can listen online via 102.5's website. You would definitely be surprised by the listener comments. The Clintons HAVE lost a lot of respect in the Black community and it's not Clyburn or Obama's fault!
I don't imagine Sharpton speaks for much of the black community.
This is a case of the people being HOODWINKED and BAMBOOZELED by the cheerleaders in the MSM for Obama. They tried to make Obama seem like Tiger Woods, but now you're seeing the truth with his race batting and the friends he surrounds himself with. Obama claims he wasn't bright enough to notice that Rev. Wright was a race batting hater, I guess he didn't listen to that "Audacity of Hope" sermon very well, where Wright blames "White Man's Greed in a World of Need" and then complains about America dropping the Atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII.
ATL.....did you check out the race memo from the obama camp that listed statements from the Clintons that could be twisted to look like race-baiting?
Bovine Scatology..........
Great post and argument! Wow! Thank you for speaking the truth.
Wow, the comments on this post are FANTASTIC.
The blogger makes an intelligent, compelling and logical argument... and the Obamabots spin out of control.
Funny how Obama is supposed to have the vote of the calm, educated, clear thinking liberal, and yet these posts show is supporters to be anything but.
Reason is met with and contested by name calling, illogical arguments and blatant falsehoods. You Obamabots need to get a grip on reality.
If you didnt read the whole post... read it. If you did, read it again, and read it with a clear head. You will see that it makes perfect sense.
Oh, and I love that Obama now has his first "firewall" state coming up! Hillary has had many of them, and she has done well with all of them. We know Obama isn't a closer, so it should be interesting to see if he can hold his "firewall."
AND, if he wins by less than his lead in the polls from a few months ago, can the Clinton people then be allowed to parrot like idiots "Yes she lost, but she closed the gap so it really is a win...." I can't wait.
Is it really necessary to call Obama's supporters "Obamabots" when you will have to bring the party together after the primary - regardless of the nominee?
Please, go ahead and say "they started it..."
As to the logic of this article I'll leave it for the majority of the other commentators to pass sentence - although I did like the "Bovine Scatology" comment in particular
And where's the neyah-nah, neyah-nah?? Isn't it obligatory?
Interesting... when Clinton spew race baiting comments it's politics and we better handle the heat. When Obama does it, it's race baiting and he ought to drop. Another fair & balanced view, from the neorepublican Clinton camp.
Boy did you miss the point. It'w when the Obama campaign twists a non racial statement and makes false claims of it being racial that the Obama campaign is engaging in race-baiting.
wah. wah. wah
So which is it? Is Obama a novice who doesn't know how to win in politics or has his campaign been able to paint his opponent as racist? Can't be both.
Talk to some African Americans. We don't need Obama to see it was racial. We heard it ourselves.
Good Post and needed to be said.
Glad you think so. I think it only pissed off African Americans more than they already were.
Wilentz, Your article is ludicrous. Obama's campaign interjected race! Bill Clinton is asked a question unrelated to his response! No one told Bill to bring up Jesse Jackson! And you blame the Obama campaign. Obama has never run on his race, he is both black and white and for you to insinuate that is despicable.
Clyburn said that Bill and Hillary were runing a nasty campaign trying to damage Obama so he would have no chance of winning. Just because Clyburn is black does not make this a race statement. Clyburn has been nothing but objective. Don't you tell me that the Clintons are innocent. The people are not stupid.
You tell me why every debarcle concerning Obama, Hillary's name comes up. 1) Rev. Wright: Hillary said I wouldn't have stayed in that church! Have you questioned a church Hillary goes to? 2) The San Francisco speech: who taped this, a Hillary supporter and Hillary pounced on it to lie about Obama just to get votes. 3) William Ayers: Steph, Hillary supporter intro to debate, but no mention of the connection of Ayers with the Clintons. 4) Now, Rev. Wright at the National Press Club: Hillary supporter invited Rev. Wright because they had baited questions.
Clinton is being treated unfairly! You should be ashamed of yourself. She is trying everything she can and she is upset that she is not leading. No one has an entitlement to the Presidency and especially Clinton.
What Mr. Wilentz omitted from his critique is that the overwhelming number of voters for Senator Obama in this campaign have been white Americans. Surrogates for Senator Clinton should carefully weigh the basic mathematical truth that Senator Obama leads in the states won, elected delegates won and the popular vote won. Could these basics facts be the craw that sticks in Mr. Wilentz pen.
Part 3
But guess what? She's also an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.
Their supporter, Reynolds, helps arrange a speech by the outspoken and egocentric Wright which receives blanket national coverage to the disadvantage of Clinton's opponent. As Louis writes: "The Rev. Jeremiah Wright couldn't have done more damage to Barack Obama's campaign if he had tried. And you have to wonder if that's just what one friend of Wright wanted."
Reynolds has not returned e-mails or phone calls seeking comment, but Louis notes the obvious conflict between her political allegiance and her press club arrangements. He quotes a February blog entry of Reynolds saying, "My vote for Hillary in the Maryland primary was my way of saying thank you" to Clinton and her husband for his administration's successes.
Cheese....if you check it out, the speakers are chosen by a committee, not one person (per Lynn Sweet/Chicago Sun-Times). I am sure you can find Clinton supporters involved in all kinds of foundations, businesses, etc. Rev. Wright chose his words, not anyone else. Or do you think a Clinton supporter gave him his script. Wright said what he said and who would know obama better than his mentor/spiritual advisor/friend of over 20 years?
One more thing.
I've noticed a lot of posts where people wonder if Wilentz really hopes to sway people in general, Obama supporters in particular, with this piece.
The short answer is, no.
Wilentz is simply laying out a plausible defense for the indefensible.
His role is to grease, flavor and spin the undeniable bigotry enough to ease it down the throats of those non-blacks who also see what is going on. I think he well knows that no black person who has dealt with racism, the "southern strategy," or real "coded language" is buying his tripe. If you've read his piece critically, it is pretty clear that he does not care what black people think anyway.
This race, argument, contest is coming down to making the unfair seem fair enough, and the unpalatable palatable to as many people as possible.
By now, Obama supporters recognize what is happening, and what is being attempted. Just like you can't invade an unarmed country without laying the proper media groundwork, you can't steal a nomination without having enough people doubting their own common sense and discarding their own common decency.
The "indefensible" the "undeniable" the "unfair" the "unpalatable" the "unarmed" what a defense !
So, let me see if I can break this down to its simplest terms.
Obama, Clyburn, Jackson, etc. have been playing the race-card, and wrongfully accusing the Clintons and their surrogates of racism; and all those African Americans who feel that way, whether or not they've heard Obama, Clyburn, or Jackson speak on the subject are stupid, overly sensitive.
O.K....I get it now.
or how about-- Hoodwinked, bamboozeled?
Exactly! Half the folks I know have never heard of Clyburn, don't follow Jesse and weren't pro-Obama before SC. But they saw Bill on their evening news or in the paper, and have changed their minds!
Obama plays the race card when he used Farrakhan's favorite words, BAMBOOZELED, HOODWINKED and OKIE-DOKE in South Carolina and Mississippi to tell black crowds he was 'Black Enough" and his numbers with blacks shot up to 90%. When Obama uses these words it goes right over the head of most whites, but the blacks understand. Then the Obama-loving MSM blames Hillary for saying LBJ passed civil rights.
Actually, I use Okie-Doke on a daily basis. As for Bamboozled and Hoodwinked, I live in a country that actually elected a chimpanzee as a president TWICE. Those words find their way into my vocabulary often. So, Am I black enough? (oops, I'm white, but pandering to blacks when I use those words, right?)
If you're a white guy, how can you call this race baiting false? On what real grounds can you possibly stand?
When you have your surrogates send in pictures of a black candidate into Drudge with him wearing African headgear, what's your point? When your surrogates send out mass mailers trying to depict Obama as a "closet terrorist", then your candidate can't even get on stage and say that she KNOWS Barack Obama is neither Muslim nor a terrorist...when your candidate's surrogates say such disgusting rubbish as "if he wasn't a black man, he wouldn't be in the lead"...it's pretty freaking obvious that Hillary Clinton's campaign has been race baiting since the very beginning. Obama's campaign has never played the gender card...it's only been a few screwy conservative talking heads in the media who have done so. So really, how can you reward Hillary Clinton, after her campaign has obviously been race baiting, with the presidency? Because if you do think that's perfectly fine, you really ought to take a racial sensitivity course.
My personal opinion is that race is the strongest fear Clinton's campaign can find and exploit. We are a simple people. Things are much simpler if they can be reduced to black or white . Good or bad. Me or him. Since honestly detailing qualifications is waaaay harder, this is a no brainer.
cont. from previous comment:
The "memo" that Wilentz refers to is the one that was made up by an Obama staffer in South Carolina who was just keeping a list of all the dog whistles heard from the Clinton campaign. It was not a campaign strategy.
It's true that Bill's fairy tale comment was unfairly interpreted, but that's the only unfair thing that happened, and no one can fault blacks for hearing it as dissing Obama's campaign given how the media excerpted it, but also given all the static created by the dog whistles in the air.
As for "hoodwinked" and "bamboozled": I distinctly remember Obama first using these words with predominantly white audiences. No one needed to have seen the Malcolm X film to know what Obama was saying. This is really grasping!
As for Clyburn: the thing that ticked him off, the first objection he mentioned when he spoke out recently, was all this talk since Pennsylvania about Obama not being able to win the WHITE working class vote -- the meme the Clinton camp has been pushing, very successfully, on the media. That's been pissing me off too, along with this "why can't he close the deal" business. Why can't SHE close the deal? And it's clear that, given her & her campaign's dog-whistle race-baiting, she'll never win any substantial portion of the black vote, even if she is the nominee.
Strictly in mathematical terms, a candidat stands to lose more if he doesn't get the majority of white votes versus not getting the majority of black votes.
This was not intended to be a discussion of whether or not black votes are important, but on Mr. Clyburn's part it was far reaching to try to paint it as such.
Clyburn's comment about black voters also being important was only derivative of his main point, which I agreed with: outrage at the talk of whether Obama could get this group of WHITE voters was being constantly trumpeted without any mention of whether Clinton could get black voters (of any kind).
As for the numbers: they are still with Obama. In the primaries he has not only won the majority of white votes but among whites he has the progressive wing of the party, most youth, most of those who have college education + higher than $50K income, most independents and many republicans. Though she has more women and older folks, It's only the blue collar and/or rural voters (in some states) who probably wouldn't vote for him, perhaps some older folks. Women will go for the Democratic candidate.
it wasn't just the media that excerpted Bill Clinton's fairytale remark. Michelle Obama did it intentionally too. And, so did Donna Brazile
This is pathetic, it's so biased. The race & Muslim card was first played with Clinton surrogates saying that Obama might have pushed drugs ( = stereotype black drug dealer), then with Bob Kerrey's comments about Obama's Muslim connections, then with Hillary on the day of or before the NH primary, when it looked like she was going to lose again, dissing the role of Rev. King and the entire civil rights movement with her "it takes a president" comment. I thought then that this was the final nail in her coffin. That comment alone would have been sufficient to outrage blacks and liberals and most right-thinking people. Then at that MLK event where Hillary, Barack and John Edwards spoke, Hillary said "MLK would be so proud to have a YOUNG African-American and a woman running...", driving home the YOUNG BLACK MALE (scary) image, reinforced by Bob Johnson invoking Barack's early drug use, followed by his being like Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Then Bill tops it off with his Jesse Jackson comparison. The picture was complete.
cont. on next comment
Oh, I was waiting for someone to bring this one up. Go look at the quotes from what Kerrey actually said. He warned that the republcans might accuse Obama of selling drugs along with Obama's admitted drug use. Everything Kerrey said about Muslims was twisted into something he didn't say. And, just last month John Kerry, an Obama supporter , said the same basic thing about Obama's ties to the Muslim world giving him a greater understanding of the world and it was treated as a compliment. If you look at what Bob Kerrey said, it used the same complimentary language as John Kerry did.
For you to take any talk of Obama's admitted drug use as racial, you are claiming whies don't use, abuse or sell drugs. For you to say we can't discuss drug use of black candidates is ridiculous. We talked constantly about whether Bill Clinton did or did not inhale. We talked about GW's drug and alcohol use. Your assumption that no one would have talked about Obama's drug use if he was white is just wrong. Or, maybe what you are really saying is that it would be FAIR to talk about it if he was white. But, since he's black, it's not fair.
Did you really say "in coded racial terms"? What nonsense.
You don't seem very bright, go look through all of Obama's speeches and you won't hear him use the code words BAMBOOZELED, HOODWINKED and OKIE-DOKE until he gets to South Carolina. Obama wasn't getting 90% of the black vote then, Hillary was doing pretty good because many blacks were questioning if Obama was "Black Enough" He used the 'Code Words" in front of black crowds in S.C. and they understood, Obama knew about Malcolm and Farrakhan. Now yesterday Obama throws Farrakhan under the bus with Wright but loved using Farrakhan's words and didn't mind when his Church honored Farrakhan as a Great American.
Those were Malcom X words. But of course, only an elitist would know the nuances of history. I gladly declare as I proudly wear my flag pin that I too am an elitist.
Glad I'm not the only one to choke on those word!
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