The Bill Clinton-Rep. Clyburn War of Words that is Tearing the Democratic Party Apart

[McCamy Taylor]

An Obama poster asked me to post this in another thread. Since that thread was about reconciliation, I decided that this information which I have put together about one of the uglier feuds in the Democratic Primary should probably have its own thread.

You would think that after he got burned once in January making false claims about what the Clintons said, House Whip Rep. James Clyburn would be very careful about what he says in public. In January, he gave this interview to the New York Times saying that he was rethinking his neutral stance about the race in light of two offensive remarks that Hillary and Bill Clinton had made about race. The problem was that neither of them had made the remarks of which he accused them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/politics/11clyburn.html?ei=5124&en=2fe657eca309a1ff&ex=1357794000&adxnnl=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&adxnnlx=1209412935-dspz/347Bm9hTJ17FQYtLw

Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, said he was rethinking his neutral stance in his state’s presidential primary out of disappointment at comments by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton that he saw as diminishing the historic role of civil rights activists.

Snip
In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Mrs. Clinton, who was locked in a running exchange with Senator Barack Obama, a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, over the meaning of the legacies of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tried to make a point about presidential leadership.

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Mrs. Clinton said in trying to make the case that her experience should mean more to voters than the uplifting words of Mr. Obama. “It took a president to get it done.”

Snip

Mr. Clyburn, reached for a telephone interview Wednesday during an overseas inspection of port facilities, also voiced frustration with former President Clinton, who described Mr. Obama’s campaign narrative as a fairy tale. While Mr. Clinton was not discussing civil rights at the time and seemed to be referring mainly to Mr. Obama’s stance at the Iraq war, Mr. Clyburn saw the remark as a slap at the image of a black candidate running on a theme of unity and optimism.
“To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us,” said Mr. Clyburn, who said he and others took significant risks more than 40 years ago to produce such opportunities for future black Americans.

The problem with Rep. Clyburn using his position as the highest ranking African-American in the House to draw attention to these two statements and to charge that the Clintons were guilty of making racially offensive remarks is that the Clintons did not say what he claims that they said. . Clyburn, like the mainstream media and the Obama camp, was guilty of misrepresenting the Clinton’s words and causing anger within the African-American community and a deep divide within the Democratic Party.

Here is what the Clinton’s really said.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200801120003

As blogger and media critic Greg Sargent noted, a January 11 New York Times article by Carl Hulse truncated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton's January 7 comments about civil rights, omitting Clinton's reference to former President John F. Kennedy. A January 9 New York Times editorial, as well as a January 7 blog post by Sarah Wheaton on the Times' politics blog, The Caucus, and a January 7 blog post titled "Clinton and Obama, Johnson and King" by Politico senior political writer Ben Smith, also omitted the reference to Kennedy. Each of these pieces quoted Clinton saying that "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964" and that "it took a president to get it done." But each of them omitted the middle portion of Clinton's full quote, which was: "I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done"

Obama was being compared to Kennedy at the time. Clinton was comparing herself to Johnson and making the case that she had the experience and persistence to get some things done, just as LBJ was able to get things done (as those familiar with the history of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Laws and Medicare are well aware). The true meaning of her words was obvious to Ted Kennedy, who choose to endorse Obama, because he was offended by the comparison.

Now, how did Rep. Clyburn get the wrong idea about her words? Did he get the story from the news and not fact check it? Did he see this memo before it was published in the Huffington Post the next day?


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/12/obama-camps-memo-on-clin_n_81205.html

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has prepared a detailed memo listing various instances in which it perceived Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign to have deliberately played the race card in the Democratic primary.

Snip

Clinton, Criticizing Obama For Promising "False Hope" Said That While MLK
Jr. Spoke On Behalf Of Civil Rights, President Lyndon Johnson Was The One
Who Got Legislation Passed: "It Took A President To Get It Done." Clinton
rejoined the running argument over hope and "false hope" in an interview in
Dover this afternoon, reminding Fox's Major Garrett that while Martin Luther
King Jr. spoke on behalf of civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson was the
one who got the legislation passed. Hillary was asked about Obama's
rejoinder that there's something vaguely un-American about dismissing hopes
as false, and that it doesn't jibe with the careers of figures like John F.
Kennedy and King. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President
Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," Clinton said. "It took a president to
get it done."

Rep.Clyburn’s comments certainly bear a resemblance to the false charge laid out in the Obama camp’s “Race Memo” suggesting that the two may have come from a common source.

As for the charge that Bill Clinton called the Obama presidential campaign a “fairy tale” that is an even more obvious lie. And yet, again, both Clyburn and the Obama camp “Race Memo” repeat the same false charge.

Donna Brazile Lashed Into Bill Clinton For Comparing Obama To A "Fairy Tale"
And Said "It's An Insult... As An African-American" And That His Tone And
Words Are "Very Depressing." Donna Brazile lit into Bill Clinton over his
insulting comments of Obama, where he called him a "fairy tale" and said "I
could understand his frustration at this moment. But, look, he shouldn't
take out all his pain on Barack Obama. It's time that they regroup. Figure
out what Hillary needs to do to get her campaign back on track. It sounds
like sour grapes coming from the former commander in chief. Someone that
many Democrats hold in high esteem. For him to go after Obama, using a fairy
tale, calling him as he did last week. It's an insult. And I will tell you,
as an African-American, I find his tone and his words to be very depressing.
... I think his tone, I think calling Barack Obama a kid, he is a United
States senator."

Did an aid to the Congressman tell him that the Clintons had made these remarks after reading the MSM lies in the news---the news media that has been carrying the RNC’s divide and conquer message designed to keep the Democrats from getting behind any one candidate before Denver? Did he get angry emails from constituents who read the MSM lies--and again no one on his staff bothered to fact check them? Did members of the press call him and ask him to respond to their misrepresentations of what the Clintons said? Did it ever occur to him that given what he knew of the Clintons these remarks smelled fishier than last week’s tuna? Or, was he so outraged that he spoke before he thought? He would not be the first politician to develop a case of foot in mouth disease when one of his hot button issues was raised.

No one expects perfection from an elected official. What we do expect is honesty. A week later, Rep. Clyburn announced that he was going to broker a peace and attempt to mend the rift within the Democratic Party over race. However, he did not apologize for accusing the Clintons of saying things which they did not say.

http://thehill.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70725&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=70

“Clyburn Mulls Mission to Try to End Racial Clash”

The top African-American member in Congress’s leadership is considering flying home early to South Carolina this week on a mission to cool a raging racial debate that has engulfed the Democratic presidential contest.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said he may leave Washington before the end of the week to try to soothe tensions that have broken out just a week before his state’s crucial Democratic primary.
Snip

Mr. Clyburn raised the stakes in the fight later in the week when he told The New York Times that Hillary Clinton’s comments “bothered me a great deal.”
“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics. It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those,” Clyburn said.
He also said Bill Clinton’s description of Obama’s campaign narrative as a “fairy tale” seemed insulting.
Clyburn said it misses the point to argue whether Martin Luther King Jr. or President Lyndon Johnson was more important to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964.
“I don’t think you can go back and make value judgments about who was more important, the person who brings it to the table or the person who gets it passed,” Clyburn said.

As I posted in a previous journal, the author of this piece, Mike Soraghan, is guilty of fraud. He attempts to make it look like Rep. Clyburn is still saying that Billed Obama’s presidential run a “fairy tale” and that Hillary said that LBJ was a better man that Dr. King even after he talked to her. In fact, he is quoting remarks he made a week before to the NYT. I had to read this piece twice, carefully to understand how he was able to get away with this.

Once again, the news media is a big fat liar . Now, if the Clinton camp, especially Bill Clinton read this without the eye of a media critic, he would have been furious. Most normal readers would have concluded from this piece that Clyburn had told the reporter “I am going to broker a peace, even though the Clintons are evil people who stomped all over the hopes and dreams of African-Americans.” That is what the MSM wants every Democrat to believe. More oil on the fire.

Had Rep. Clyburn publicly apologized for misrepresenting Bill Clinton’s remarks and had he issued a public explanation for Hillary Clinton’s remarks, we might not have people at the Huffington Post and Democratic Underground still swearing that Bill Clinton called the thought of a Black man being president a “fairy tale” or that Hillary said that Johnson was a greater civil rights leader than Dr. King. We all know that it does no good for the Clintons to try to correct the record. The MSM does not print anything they say unless they can twist it into another scandal. That is because they are mad at the Clintons, at Hillary for talking about the right wing conspiracy and at Bill Clinton for doing things like wagging his finger at “Gentle” Chris Wallace.

Politicians have their pride. That is why Bill Clinton acted like a fool after his wife’s crushing defeat in South Carolina and attributed Barack Obama’s win to that camp’s interjection of race into the race with his “Jesse Jackson” remark. Had Clinton shown an ounce of sense, he would have realized that in the larger scheme of things, the Democratic Party had just been beaten by the forces of divide and conquer as wielded by the RNC under Karl Rove and he would have shook his finger at the press as he shook it as Chris Wallace of Fox News. Starting with Chris Matthews at MSNBC and his “Paleface speaks with forked tongue” remarks after the New Hampshire primary, the corporate media had been attempting to get Democrats to take up verbal hammers and start slugging it out with each other on the battlefield of race----where only the Republicans stood to gain. They could not get Obama and Hillary, the two savvy candidates to fall for their baiter games, but they managed to get the two testosterone laden old dogs, Clyburn and Clinton to play. And they got someone in Obama’s camp to play---that is where the Race Memo comes in. And they got lots of surrogates like Donna Brazil and BET Founder Johnson to play.

Now, here is true leadership.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/jackson-not-upset-by-clinton-remarks/?hp

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said late Sunday that he was not offended by comments on Saturday by former President Bill Clinton, who brought up Mr. Jackson’s name in response to a question about Senator Barack Obama.

Snip
“I don’t read anything negative into Clinton’s observation,” Mr. Jackson said in a phone conversation late Sunday night from India, where he is taking part in a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

Still, Mr. Jackson said that he had spoken to Mr. Obama on Saturday night and to Mr. Clinton a few days earlier and that he had appealed to both to “take it to a higher ground.”

I agree with the Founders that we need the State to stay out of Churches’ business---for the good of religion--- but I think that this country and the world only benefits when progressive religious leaders take an active role in affairs of state.

Bill Clinton should have apologized for his “Jesse Jackson” remark, whether or not anyone else chose to apologize for their mischaracterizations of his “fairy tale” remarks. That would have been the statesmanlike thing to do. He is the ex-president after all. He has more power than the other people involved, so an apology would have meant a lot coming from him. However, he left it to his wife, Hillary to apologize for him. That was a shameful sexist thing for him to do. Women are always being called upon to make peace after their husbands make trouble.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VC9QC80&show_article=1

Her biggest apology came in response to a question about comments by her husband, Bill Clinton, after the South Carolina primary, which Obama won handily. Bill Clinton said Jesse Jackson also won South Carolina when he ran for president in 1984 and 1988, a comment many viewed as belittling Obama's success.
"I want to put that in context. You know I am sorry if anyone was offended. It was certainly not meant in any way to be offensive," Hillary Clinton said. "We can be proud of both Jesse Jackson and Senator Obama."

With neither of the principles of this war of words in January willing to admit that they made a mistake, it is no wonder that they are at is again.

As usual it was a member of the press that set it off. WHYY ‘s Susan Phillip’s accused Clinton of “marginalizing Obama as the Black candidate” and then went on to ask the question that the few people who bother to provide a transcription of the exchange record.

http://iowapoliticalalert.blogspot.com/2008/04/huh-bill-clinton-claims-race-card.html

Here’s the transcript: INTERVIEWER (RE: Jackson comment): “Do you think that was a mistake, and would you do that again?"

CLINTON: "No. I think that they played the race card on me. And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it along. Jesse Jackson -- I said, if you go back to what I said … First of all, there was a conversation that I engaged in that included two African America members of Congress, who were standing right there, who were having the conversation with me. And I said that Jesse Jackson had won a good campaign with overwhelming African American support and white supporters. And this was started off because people didn’t wanna -- they wanted to act like, for reasons I didn’t understand, that Senator Obama didn’t have this African American support, or they thought his white support was better because Jesse Jackson had blue-collar working people, and most of Senator Obama’s support were upscale, cultural liberals. So it was like beneath them to be compared to Jesse Jackson.

"I respect Jesse Jackson. He’s a friend of mine, even though he endorsed Senator Obama. One of his sons and his wife endorsed Hillary. Their whole family’s divided. But his campaign in 1988 was a seminal campaign in American history. It was the first campaign to ever to openly involve gays. Hillary’s chief delegate counter, Harold Ickes, worked his heart out for Jesse Jackson. I frankly thought the way Obama campaign reacted was disrespectful to Jesse Jackson. And I called him and asked him if he found anything offensive, and he just laughed and he said, ‘Of course I don’t. We all know what’s going on.’”

"I mean this is just, you know… You gotta go something to play the race card on me -- my office is in Harlem. And Harlem voted for Hillary, by the way. And I have 1.4 million people around the world, mostly people of color in Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and elsewhere, on the world’s least expensive AIDS drugs. I appointed more African American, Hispanic and women judges and U.S. Attorneys than all previous presidents put together and had nine African American Cabinet members.

"I was stating a fact. And it is still a fact. You know, I was amazed that we got almost 20% of the African American vote in South Carolina, and I think it was because we had so many local officials who believed in Hillary and stuck their necks out for her, some of which were threatened with their jobs. But I can see that this used against me, but this was a conversation that occurred early in the morning. We didn’t even know what the vote was gonna be at the time. We were all sitting around drinking coffee. We’d just been to breakfast. We were talking about South Carolina political history. And this was used out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere.

"And, you know, do I regret saying it? No. Do I regret that it was used that way? I certainly do. But you really gotta go something to try to portray me as a racist."

Note that the press and TV news media give Susan Phillips a free pass. They do not report that she baited the ex-president by accusing him of “marginalizing Obama as the Black candidate” and that Phillip’s real question was “Do you regret marginalizing Obama as the Black candidate ?” (When did you stop beating your wife?) to which his answer was a very predictable WTF? They called me a racist?

GE/NBC saw a chance to interject race into the race again, so the next day we get this attack:

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/22/931095.aspx

Now, what bothers me about this video is that I have to take NBC’s word for it that they have transcribed the question correctly because they do not let us hear the question. Just as with the written transcript of Susan Phillip’s interview above, there is a possibility that tone or inflection could have changed the meaning of the words. Or maybe they didn’t even ask this question. Or there could have been a lead in that changed the meaning of the words.

Even if the transcript is accurate, the question is untrue.

“what did you mean yesterday when you said that the Obama campaign was playing the race card on you? “

Tense here is important. The questioner is asking why Clinton said that the Obama camp is actively playing the race card. That was not what Clinton said. He spoke about the events in January. That is past tense. A lawyer like Clinton knows the difference. So of course he got mad and accused NBC of trying to start trouble.

You have mischaracterized it to get another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us, and I choose not to play your game today.

However, we all know what really happened here. Clinton had a bad case of buyer’s remorse. The day before, Susan Phillip’s provoked him with her barbed comment, and so he brought up the Race Memo in order to defend himself. He realized later that this issue was divisive and he did not want to talk about it, not on national television. So, he seized upon a legal quibble to change the subject for the good of the party.

Predictably, the press fired back at this attack on itself by accusing Clinton of lying, since the thing which the MSM hates most is being caught in one of its baiting games.

Now, Clyburn, who had never bothered to apologize for falling for the media lies about the two Clintons’ statements in January probably did not like the implications of Bill Clinton’s reference to the Race Memo. Let sleeping dogs lie is how some people prefer to play politics. It is a dumb strategy, when you are playing against Karl Rove. If Obama is the nominee, you can count on RNC whores in the press to suddenly “discover” the Race Memo in the fall and discover that Clyburn and Brazile and a whole host of other influential people were going around making the same claims that were contained within that Memo. At the same time African-American voters were becoming angry at the Clintons and Obama’s poll numbers were rising. McCain will use this manufactured scandal to paint Obama as a cheater and divisive, and White Independents and Republicans who will be looking for an excuse to vote against him based upon race (an excuse that will not make them feel like racists) will have one.

The only way to defuse this time bomb is through reconciliation----everyone involved needs to sit down, discuss it, admit that they got punked by bad reporting in the press and admit their own gullibility and temper. That includes the Obama camp which should have come clean, said “Hey, some newbie read some news reports about things the Clintons and their surrogates did and thought they represented a pattern, and the newbie did not do any fact checking, but took it upon him/herself to put together this document. We apologize for the inaccuracies it contains and here are the steps we have taken to ensure that it never happens again. ” When I was in private medical practice, I always found that the best course, when I or my staff made a mistake was to tell patients immediately. As long as I was honest and I could say “This is what we have done to make sure that this can never happen again” most people are very understanding. No one expects perfection, just honesty, good intentions and your best effort.

Rep. Clyburn had other ideas. When Clinton mentioned the unmentionable, he struck back.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/black-congressman-denounces-b-clintons-remarks/

The third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives and one of the country’s most influential African-American leaders sharply criticized former President Bill Clinton this afternoon for what he called Mr. Clinton’s “bizarre” conduct during the Democratic primary campaign.

Representative James E. Clyburn, an undeclared superdelegate from South Carolina who is the Democratic whip in the House, said that “black people are incensed over all of this,” referring to statements that Mr. Clinton had made in the course of the heated race between his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Clinton was widely criticized by black leaders after he equated the eventual victory of Mr. Obama in South Carolina in January to that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1988 – a parallel that many took as an attempt to diminish Mr. Obama’s success in the campaign. In a radio interview in Philadelphia on Monday, Mr. Clinton defended his remarks and said the Obama campaign had “played the race card on me” by making an issue of those comments.

Um… no. Actually, Clinton did not claim that they played the race card by talking about his "Jesse Jackson remark" He claimed that they played the race card with the Race Memo. However, this counter offensive by Rep. Clyburn was meant to wipe the Race Memo off the political radar with a newer, flashier subject.

Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost “unanimous” view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were “committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win.”

Is there really? I haven’t seen the poll that says that almost all African-Americans believe that the Clintons are trying to keep Obama from winning this fall.

As one might expect. Rep. Clyburn could not backtrack from this divisive position quickly enough. In a stunning imitation of a deer caught in the headlights, he was interviewed by Keith Olbermann. He said that he did not agree with this assessment. He was only repeating what he had heard.

OLBERMANN: So, the gist of this today is, from the remarks that you made to “The New York Times,” and to “Reuters” you heard this enough that it‘s a problem in the campaign that the Clinton campaign needs to address in some way, but you, yourself, are not necessarily of the opinion that they‘re actually sabotaging Obama‘s chances in November if he‘s the nominee?
CLYBURN: That‘s correct. I‘m not—in fact, I‘ve seen some writings today from opinion writers all over the country now saying the same thing. In fact, I understand that “The New York Times” article, is going to run a story on Sunday, is saying that they are gathering that same kind of sentiment from all over the country. So, I‘m not saying anything that people aren‘t saying among themselves and many of them are saying it to me. It just so happens, that on yesterday or the day before, whenever I said it, I made public what I had been told.
OLBERMANN: I think that took some courage, sir. James Clyburn of South Carolina, third ranking Democrat in Congress. Great thanks for some of your time tonight.
Never mind that a whole bunch of people were saying it because the New York Times had told everyone that Rep. Clyburn said that all Black people believed it.

I am sure that felt good for both men. For about half a day. I know it felt good for Karl Rove and the RNC. They are just tickled pink. Clinton labeled Obama a dirty trickster and called himself a victim, never mind that he is very scary and very hard to turn into a victim, so he sounded like a whiner and a liar. Hillary Clinton has been labeled a traitor to her Party. And Clyburn has all but announced himself an Obama supporter with this latest move. Since only a dirty trickster would accuse his candidate’s opponent of staying in the race just to thwart her own party (remember what Lawrence O’Donnell’s “John Edwards’ is a Loser” did to its author?) Clyburn has slimed both himself and Obama. That makes his a triple play friendly fire-suicide smear.

Does Karl Rove even need to pay the people at RNC oppo? He could save the money and use it for McCain’s inaugural bash. Looks to me like some hot political heads are taking care of the divide and conquer operation all on their own, with a whole lot of help from the media whores in the press.

Maybe Bill Clinton and Rep. Clyburn both need spokespeople to start doing their talking to the press for them as well as media watchdogs to read and interpret the stories that the press feeds them.

Maybe we need to get Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter in there to broker a peace agreement. As far as I can see, the only thing wrong with the Democratic Party is a lot of pig headedness and people unwilling to sit down and talk in order to find the common ground that stretches wider than the old Soviet Union. Rev. Wright talked about reconciliation. How can this party reconcile anything if we can not reconcile two very good men who have done great things for this country?

[cali]

1. Again a torrent of words and impressive formatting with no evidence: Let's get down to brass tacks

This is the claim I found spurious. And again, you have provided ZERO evidence that Clyburn played any dirty tricks, let alone the dirtiest tricks to come out of the dem party in half a century.


Followed by Rep. James Clyburn escalating his feud with former president Bill Clinton with some of the most shameful dirty tricks to come out of the Democratic Party since dead men voted for Kennedy/Johnson back in 1960.

People perceive things differently. That's a fact. Many people- not just Clyburn- perceived the Clinton camp, particularly in NC, as trying to frame Obama as a fringe minority niche candidate who couldn't attract white voters (the majority of voters) in the states following NC. We can argue from here to doomsday about it, but neither of us can prove anything. This is largely a matter of perception. Why did President Clinton choose to use the words "fairy tale" in conjunction with Obama? Why would he say that Obama's unambiguous opposition to the IWR and the war itself was a "fairy tale"? In brief, why did he lie? Or is this simply President Clinton's perception? In any case, MY perception of President Clinton via his words in NH, are that he was frustrated and he mischaracterized Obama's stance on the war. Here's what he said, and he absolutely cherry picked.


"It is wrong that Sen. Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year, enumerating the years, and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war," Clinton said at a campaign stop in Hanover, New Hampshire.

"And you took that speech you're now running on off your Web site in 2004. And there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since."
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/08/bill-clinton-targets-media-coverage-of-obama/
He added, "Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

Clinton mischaracterized what Obama said about not knowing how he would have voted.

And what was the context for Obama's comment? It was in the context of his support for Kerry who had voted for the IWR and was the nominee of the Democratic party.

And say what, McCamy?

ill Clinton should have apologized for his “Jesse Jackson” remark, whether or not anyone else chose to apologize for their mischaracterizations of his “fairy tale” remarks. That would have been the statesmanlike thing to do. He is the ex-president after all. He has more power than the other people involved, so an apology would have meant a lot coming from him. However, he left it to his wife, Hillary to apologize for him. That was a shameful sexist thing for him to do. Women are always being called upon to make peace after their husbands make trouble.

How was it sexist for Hillary to apologize? Ultimately, it's her campaign, and frankly I don't view what she said so much as an apology but as a reinforcement of the whole linking Obama to Jackson meme. And anyone with a scrap of honesty will admit that despite winning quite a few primaries, Jackson was indeed viewed as a fringe minority candidate and very few ever saw him as a viable candidate to get the nomination.

Moving along. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Phillips question and there's everything wrong with your translation of it? She asked: RE: Jackson comment): “Do you think that was a mistake, and would you do that again?" You claim that what she was really saying is “Do you regret marginalizing Obama as the Black candidate ?”
And you put into quotes something she never said. Again, that's what YOU perceive. It's not factual. I perceive it differently. And I find Clinton's response to the question passing strange. I find his comments about having his office in Harlem (particularly in light of knowing the actual history of how he came to have his office there) very odd. Sort of like saying, some of my best friends..."

I actually agree with you about a couple of things- imo, both Clyburn and President Clinton have shot off their mouths intemperately. But for the love of reason, your comment that Clyburn has played the dirtiest tricks in a dem v dem campaign is completely ridiculous and you in NO way provided evidence for it.

I want to add that I don't think Karl Rove is some uber political genius, who behind the scenes of the dem primary is pulling all these strings. I think he's a third rate political hack, who got lucky, and who in the end, is actually responsible, in large part, for the demise of the republican majority. You seem him under every bed and behind every tree like a frightened child.

In the end you provide no evidence for your claims, but you do reinforce my belief that most of this is about how human perception is rooted in our experiences and the lens we view things through. You rely heavily on your interpretation of what YOU call the "race memo" I see things differently. Oh, and I don't see the Clintons as racists for one moment, but my perception is that they did indeed try to frame Obama as the "black candidate" when he was running as the candidate who happened to be black.

[McCamy Taylor]

2. And I perceive that the MSM has been painting Clinton as a dirty trickster since

before the candidates announced and the MSM interjected race into the race and the MSM misquoted both Clintons in order to divide and conquer the Democratic Primary for their corporate masters as part of a brokered Democratic Primary strategy and that people believed the MSM and became outraged and that influential people (like Rep. Clyburn and Donna Brazile) spoke out against the Clintons without bothering to fact check the MSM which lent credence to the narrative which the MSM was trying to create, namely that Bill and Hillary Clinton were dumb enough to try to characterize Obama as a 100% Black candidate before entering the first primary where the African-American vote was going to be significant.

Even the people who believe that Bill and Hillary are the two heads of a two-headed anti-Christ do not believe that they are stupid. That is where this whole theory that they tried to interject race before South Carolina falls apart. Were they conspiring to do anything, it would have been to paint him as mostly White . You know, the product of a White upbringing, whose dad just happened to be from Africa. The one who benefited from suddenly being a victim of racism was....Barack Obama.

However, I am not convinced that David Axelrod did it, because he would have to know that this strategy would be divisive in the long run. It would be a fool's game that would allow for a quick win in South Carolina but it would fracture the Democratic Party. Therefore, it was either played by a someone not thinking straight or someone thinking on a local, South Carolina scale only----or by the RNC.

[Texas Hill Country]

3. agreed. this has been a horrible misrepresentation of the Clintons.

[NashVegas]

4. kicking

because Clyburn is injecting "Clintons are enemies of black people" tactics once again.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/black-congressman-denounces-b-clintons-remarks/