The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.
There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way - any way - back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.
He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!
The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.
(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)
But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.
I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people - or most working-class white people - are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
The last time the Clintons had to make a big exit was at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president - and they made a complete and utter hash of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you might have thought the Clintons would be on their best behavior.
Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation from Mr. Clinton.
Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee couple that had hired him as a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.
Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell, who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the sentence commutation for Vignali.
Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.
Both Clintons professed to be ignorant of anything improper or untoward regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: “People would hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any reason to look into them.”
It wasn’t just the pardons that sullied the Clintons’ exit from the White House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president’s last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket), flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they decided to repay the value of the gifts.
So class is not a Clinton forte.
But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee - and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.
The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.
Bob Herbert writes for The New York Times.
© 2008 The New York Times
What do you expect, they’ve lived in Arkansas too long, and now N.Y.
Even Mississippi says “At Least We’re Not Arkansas.” and they probably should include N.Y. in that.
Get over it Bill, you can’t go back to the White House. You were the best President we’ve had since Truman, and I’d again support you totally if you could get there, but only if it were YOU as President, however, sadly your time has past.
Never underestimate what appealing to the worst in Americans will get you. In the past it has given us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Wanker Bush and now his poisoned progeny, George Wanker Bush. A million Willie Hortons are at this moment being created in the Republicans Frankenstein laboratory. About 50% of them are being mixed with the blood of Osama bin Laden. Remember Harold Ford’s run for the senate in Tennessee in ‘06. That blond bimbo with the cell phone will be making non-stop calls asking, “Why don’t you give me a ring some time, Barack.” And this, as they say, is just for starters. Citizen McCain and the Gestapo thugs who will orchestrate his campaign will use the same gutter tactics George Wanker Bush used on him in 2000. So expect to hear that Obama had a half human puppy through his liason with a “mixed breed bitch” he got from the animal shelter. Once the conventions are over, get yourselves a raincoat to keep the filth off you. THIS is going to be the nastiest, filthiest, most degrading presidential campaign of all time - - - and it will dishonor us all, no matter who wins.
The Clinton family has been insulting Americans for decades. And in a few weeks Hillary will crawl back to her Senate seat and continue selling our Constitution to corporate America while Bill will do oil and gas business all over the empire.
Hoa binh
There will probably be a lot of Manchurian Candidate stuff with Hussein.
Obama could bring up McCain’s traitorous POW years, but it wont sell. No way a black man can diss a white war veteran.
The best he can do is talk about Bush’s third term.
Obama should consider converting to Judaism, that might give him enough cover.
And at least half of the dems support these jaded creeps. How ANY American could support either of them is beyond me. NAFTA, Waco, Iraq, Telecommunications act of 1996, along with their low-life acts in general.
Send ‘em back to the hills where they belong!
UGH! What trash!
Obama supporters should look up to him and take the high road. While Clinton wronged the party’s heritage of inclusiveness, there is no point now in continuing this tit for tat. Obama is the likely nominee; let’s start working towards winning in November. McCain is the enemy, not Clinton. Let’s keep the eye on the ball.
Why do Obama supporters think it is healthy to keep bashing Hillary Clinton? It’s so idiotic! Why not make a case for your candidate? But, oh, I forgot, you can’t because there ISN’T a strong case to make for the do nothing Senator from Illinois! Who sells out other black people, and is bought and paid for by Wall Street, and has ZERO substance in his policy positions! NO to Obama, NO to McCain - vote oustide the one-party Dem-Repub system. I’m leaning towards Cynthia McKinney.
“Why do Obama supporters think it is healthy to keep bashing Hillary Clinton?”
Because she’s a Neocon kamikaze sent out by the Reps to destroy what’s left of the Democratic party, that’s why.
Ah, yes. The Hillbilly Clintons, still fightin’ like mad.
Sure, let’s let this contest drag on a while longer, just long enough to allow some of us to make the case that Bill Clinton wasn’t really such a great Democratic president after all.
We all recall his glaring failure in Rwanda. But there was also his work on behalf of pharmaceutical companies to prevent foreign governments in Third World countries from issuing compulsory licenses to produce inexpensive, life-saving drugs.
Only when Gore was running for president in Campaign 2000 — and only under pressure from activists — did the administration finally see the light and revise some of its previous strong-arm tactics.
I believe civil liberties was another area where Bill Clinton repeatedly disappointed.
Racial progress? What racial progress? Are you speaking of the partial racial progress granted to African Americans? Sure African American’s have achieved some racial progress. Selfishly they in turn have not granted racial progress to American Indians. Yes that’s right. African American football players eagerly play for the Washington Redskins. Did you know that Redskins (the “R” word) is just as offensive to American Indians as Nigger (the “N” word) is to African Americans. So why not an outcry from Blacks about the use of the “R” word? Can you immagine if the team changed it’s name to the Washington Niggers? People of all colors would go ballistic! So I ask, why is it okay to use the word Redskins with no outcry? Huh, I can’t hear you?
Obama’s victory over Hillary in the dem primary has clearly demonstrated her superior electability. Pardon me, but I don’t get it.
Look for Hillary to appear in white sheet and stylish pointy hood, before this race is over.
Hillary and Bill aren’t racist. They’re only pointing out that it’s someone else who is racist, like “hard working whites”. The Clintons are just pointing out that fact. Hillary and Bill aren’t Republicans. They’re just using all the Republican attack points that will be made against Obama. They’re just sayin’, you know? But they themselves? Oh no, they’re not any of THOSE things.
Hillary Dillary Dock
Barack ran up the clock
The clock struck one
Hillary was done
Hillary Dillary Dock
After all the populist rhetoric from 1992 on, what America got was NAFTA, the TeleCommunications Act of 1996 which turned over the great majority of the radio and TV spectrum to the Right Wing, and an economic boom in the 1990’s that didn’t “raise all boats” and burst with the high-tech bubble. Think about it!
Still: I hope he offers her the V.P. slot.
They’d win fur sur.
I’m quite certain Hillary was simply refering to the latest polls when she said, accurately, “I’m winning with the small town, white voters”
They say politics makes strange bedfellows. I honestly DON’T believe that the Clinton that’s been playing the ’small town, hard working white folks’ card has a racist bone in her body (or in her husbands body either). They have proven through too many years otherwise, years when it ALSO would have aided them to play that card.
Those who would throw stones at her should remember what kind of stones have been thrown Obama’s way for saying ’small town’ voters clutched their guns and crosses, and were (thus encumbered), too busy or stupid for vote correctly. This has been a exhausting race for both candidates, they BOTH deserve to be president. Given the vote, I hope an Obama/Clinton ticket is what we see this November. But I could easily vote for it the other way around.
Lets agree to call it ‘an embarrassment of riches’ (BTW, their opponent, John McCain is the BEST Republican candidate in years: he shoulda been Prez 8 years ago, but he got ’swiftboated’ by Rove/Cheney before people understood just what was happening with the Bush campaign. Unfortunately, he’s a Republican…)
Please don’t even suggest that McCain is fit to be President. He is not educated or equipped in ANY WAY for the real world that is all around him—he is a cultural dinosaur stuck in Vietnam who was a major building block of the mess into which we have been sinking since at least Reagan….and he will smarm us all to death so HE can feel good “winning the war”….. Anybody who calls everybody “my friends” and lays his hand over his heart while hiding behind “our young men and women in uniform and harm’s way” is dangerous, as dangerous as all the rest of the imperial GOP….
Just like the Republicans, the Clintons appeal to the very worst in people’s natures. Bill Clinton hurt the Democratic Party in the 90’s with the ML affair, and ultimately hurt Al Gore in the 2000 election. It now appears the Clintons aren’t quite through damaging the Party, and maybe even the country. Hillary is polarizing, and many Americans don’t care to revisit the 90’s. I used to support the Clintons, but lately have developed serious Clinton fatigue.
Hillary is using the old Republican racist code words to gain traction in her two major constituencies: rednecks and retirees. She’s going for the beer and prune-juice swillers because they’re the only ones gullible enough–remember, these are the people that put Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes into office–to vote for her.
Eric Barth says it well.
Add welfare “reform”, privatization (e.g., creating USIS to handle all civilian security investigations), and various other impersonations of a Republican executive.
Hillary may be channeling the spirit of Lee Atwater, but there’s a scary element of truth in what she said.
Why does anyone not in his congregation care about Jeremiah Wright? Why does anyone care whether Obama bowls? Why do they care if he drinks coffee or orange juice while campaigning in a diner?
Short answer — a lot of people are just waiting to grasp at a straw of an excuse for not voting for Obama.
“Oh, I wanted to vote for him, but I just can’t, because he doesn’t wear a flag lapel pin.”
Translation — It’s not racist if there’s a non-racial explanation, no matter how flimsy.
We’ll see in November. Really hope I’m wrong (and Hillary is too).
The sooner these carpetbaggers are booted off the political stage, the better IMHO.
What’s the point of this nonsense?
Both Clinton and Obama are corporate, establishment supported candidates.
Bob Herbert is a fool(or a deceiver) for not saying this obvious truth. They, as well as McCain, shoud be opposed equally. They will all continue wrecking, and refusing to improve, our country.
Where’s the stage hook? Ding dong the witch is dead… That’s all folks…
Now lets just hope Obama is even a little bit real and not just another war mongering corporate tool…
Redskins ain’t cool either. Been saying that for 30 years now. haven’t got noplace with it though….
The Amerindians are the lowest of the low, even under the blacks in some ways….
She has always had a terrible image problem since her husband started running in the early 90’s. The right has bashed her into oblivion (and a lot of it hasn’t been her fault). To many American’s listen to the lunatic fringe rhetoric and believe every word of it. So she is widely hated by many. This episode of refusing to leave gracefully while she still has some character left isn’t going to help her in the future. It makes her look like the lunatics have accused her of being for years. All Hillary and Bill are going to do is destroy the Democrat’s chances in November. She is going to have to live with the results of her actions. Because a lot of us are going to blame her personally for the loss.
JACK 37: Apt depiction of McCain.
Let’s have some revenge. If Obama wins the nomination, then Hilary will defend her seat in the Senate in 2012, right? Let’s do to her what she’s doing to Obama now: run somebody against her in the 2012 Senatorial primary, all the way to the bitter end.
Rich educated white trash is the worst kind.
They know better and don’t need the money but still do ignorant, mean and selfish things anyway !
If Hillary is a “liberated” American woman for the 21st century, we are all in trouble !
Don’t know if it’s the aura of arrogance and entitlement that oozes out of every Clinton, or if it’s the disgustingly racist campaign tactics, last-minute rule-changing and party-destroying soundbites that make me so sick of these people or if it is the willingness of their apparently blind, deaf and amoral supporters to overlook all of the above.