Daily Howler - Clinton playing the race card?

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http://www.dailyhowler.com/

Robinson seems like a thoroughly decent man—as most people are. But his column starts with a nasty charge, one that shouldn’t be offered up lightly. “Playing the race card against Barack Obama didn’t work out quite the way Bill Clinton had hoped,” he said at the start of his piece. That was a very serious charge. And here was the deeply unfortunate, disingenuous way Robinson chose to “defend” it:

ROBINSON (1/29/08): I wonder how all the Clintonistas who protested that Bill and Hillary Clinton would never, ever dream of stooping to racial politics must be feeling now, after Bill was videotaped in the act. On Saturday, as Democrats in South Carolina went to the polls, a reporter asked Bill about Obama's boast that it took two Clintons to try to beat him. Bill replied: "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here."

Now, the question had nothing to do with Jesse Jackson. So why do you suppose such an expert on American politics as Bill Clinton with no prompting, would bring up contests that took place decades ago—back when South Carolina picked its convention delegates in caucuses, not primaries? John Edwards's victory four years ago, in a primary, would have been much more relevant; he ran a good campaign, too.

Why did Clinton bring up those earlier contests? Well, here’s a painfully obvious answer: He was saying that a major African-American candidate has an advantage in South Carolina, due to its large black electorate! Indeed, that’s what Foreman said last night—and everyone had offered some variant of this obvious statement over the previous year. Everyone had mentioned the fact that Obama had an edge in the Palmetto State. Why, a certain Post pundit had even said it, fairly often—and his name was Gene Robinson! Last July, for example, Robinson wondered if blacks might fail to warm to Obama due to fears that a black candidate just couldn’t possibly win:

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In part, Robinson’s account is correct; almost surely, Bill Clinton was trying “to devalue Obama’s victory in South Carolina” by saying what he did. But campaigns do that all the time—it’s as American as trashing Al Gore, one of Robinson’s favorite pastimes in June 1999 (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/14/07, with links to previous work). Yep! Campaigns routinely “explain away” their own defeats and try to devalue their opponents’ victories; it’s what the Obama campaign did this week in the wake of the Florida voting. (There’s nothing wrong with it.) For the Clinton campaign, it would be perfectly obvious to “explain” South Carolina by noting Obama’s advantage in the state—an advantage that Robinson had cited, several times, during the previous year. Obama did have an edge in the state. There’s nothing wrong with saying so.

Here at THE HOWLER, we said that Bill Clinton was very dumb to make that reference to Jesse Jackson, He was dumb because Washington pundits were looking for ways to call him a racist (in much the way Peter Beinart dusts up Gore again this morning). Why, Bill Clinton had already said “fairy tale!” It was the most racist thing we’ve ever heard, many pundits were prepared to pretend. For that reason, Clinton’s statement was, at the least, very dumb. In making the statement, he took the bait; he gave them the club they were after.