NYT picks up the "shuck and jive" story. [View All]

[jefferson_dem]

*******

Other bloggers more interested in the Clinton campaign busied themselves by questioning the remarks of one of her top local supporters. Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general, yesterday made these remarks about New Hampshire and Iowa:

It’s not a TV-crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it. You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.

“Shuck and jive”? Is this phrase, with its racial undertones, a slur on Mr. Obama? Pam at Pam’s House Blend certainly thinks so:

You see folks, this is what I’m talking about. This whole “post-racial” nonsense is a simple fantasy or delusion uttered by people who think race isn’t a problem anymore. I’d like that to be the case as much as anyone else, but the fact of the matter is for Democrats, the alleged party of tolerance, this kind of bush-league nonsense exposes the real problem — that the lack of engagement on how race and political races bring out the worst in people, and plays to the base fears of voters.

Others think it was probably an accident, like Rick Karlin of Capitol Confidential, who noted that Mr. Cuomo went on a media apology tour to cover his tracks.

We’ve been getting calls from the Cuomo people on this who want to point out, correctly, that the AG was not referring to Barack Obama when he used the phrase “shuck and jive,” but to what politicians in general do with the media. Cuomo’s point was when candidates meet a substantial proportion of primary voters or caucus goers in person, such as in NH or Iowa, there is a certain genuineness that can be avoided in a big-state media-heavy campaign.

The Politico’s Ben Smith also was in touch with Mr. Cuomo, who had this to say:

“It was never about Obama in the first place,” Cuomo told me of the use of the phrase, which he said he was using “as a synonym for ‘bob and weave.’”

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/blogtalk-the-obama-kerry-alliance/

And more ---> http://news.google.com/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-40,GGLJ:en&q=cuomo+shuck+and+jive&um=1&hl=en&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=title