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Flat tire on Salvation Mountain

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Hillary Clinton plays the nuclear race card

Here Hillary panders to the lowest low imaginable. She is truly despicable. Fan the flames of racial intolerance. Boogie down in the class swamp with the less educated Amerikans. One of the guys I had coffee with this morning told me that he could vote for Colin Powell but not the islamist candidate Obama. As in "a good black man." I guess in the final analysis, color does matter in America. It is sad. I have been impressed with Obama's campaign to date which in my opinion has been pretty much race neutral. But the attack machine has managed to do an excellent job of vilifying this man and now Hillary gets into the mud and grunts as well.



If this opportunistic, scheming swine manages to get the democratic mantle, I will sit out this election. I don't care how she's polling in the trailer parks.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Robert,

I wrote a check for Obama, but I figured I'd be happy with either of the Dem candidates -- although I also figured if Clinton won the Dem nomination we'd lose, cuz every Clinton-hating-bashing-dipshit lunatic would, at long last, come out to vote, and, as I know you know, black men got the vote in the U.S. 50 years before those gals married to the white male land-owning power base did -- but I'm becoming increasingly dismayed by the Clinton's (yeah, both of them) partaking of the very tactics for which they've publicly condemned the Clinton bashers over the last 15 or 20 years. Damn. Damn.

Love,
K-B

Anonymous said...

I can't stand Hillary but shut up about the trailer parks already.
Not all there all morons.

Blue Heron said...

true - sorry - people in tin houses shouldn't throw stones...

Anonymous said...

I have as much problems with Obama's wife as I do Hillery.I'm unhappy with the choices indeed. And stop with the "tin houses" already

Blue Heron said...

Hey - I was a proud double wider for 10 years - probably got sick from the formaldehyde poisoning. Or my first wife - great seeing you guys.

Blue Heron said...

One thing Fred - Michelle Obama isn't running for office like Hillary. I think that her words were intemperate, like the Reverend Wright's - we cant apologize for them. But white people are easily offended by black rage. We think that they have been left in a perfect world with equal opportunity and it just ain't so. One of the dealer's wives(who happens to be african-american) in Santa Monica this weekend couldn't get her water glass filled in a restaurant like the rest of her party and than was harassed at the hotel. You walk by a car and all the automatic locks go down. I think that if we got a chance to be black for a weekend we would have a better understanding of their anger.

Anonymous said...

Hillery was Vice President in terms of power and Mrs.Obama will be even more so.Very intelligent lady that will have her own agenda.

Anonymous said...

Hi Robert,

I see the Dem's recreating the same mistake that Perot/Bush made, divide and conquer and it is just paving the way for McCain's sure victory. I see Hillary running as an Independent if she can't strong arm the Super Delegates to win. I am absolutely blown away that no one learns from history and they just continue with the same mistakes. However Obama is like you said running for the most part a fair and non below the belt campaign. I loved your comments about the Dealer's wife as Gam and I were just at an art show last week end and you would have cringed to hear the woman referring to his race, off by a continent, a religion and more. No acknowldegment of his Asian Buddhism but a racial slur and then video taping his artwork go figure? Anyways, being in an interracial marriage you see a lot more where Michelle Obama is coming from. Also the trailor comments were in bad taste we have wonderful photographers living in the burned down park, professional accountants, contractors and artists and more and they have had a hard enough hit with the fires, so good for you for taking that one back!

Sincerely~
Lis

Blue Heron said...

Interesting perspective from Slate:

White Voter Trap Why Clinton wasn't intentionally playing the race card.
By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, May 9, 2008, at 6:41 PM ET

When Hillary Clinton told USA Today that she was winning the white vote, she opened herself up to the charge that this was the latest gambit in her attempt to use Barack Obama's race to defeat him. It fit somewhere between Bob Johnson's ham-fisted attempt to argue that Obama wasn't black enough (while also bringing up his past drug use) and Bill Clinton's reference to Jesse Jackson after Obama's South Carolina primary win, which many saw as an attempt to dismiss Obama as a candidate with limited mass appeal.

I don't interpret Clinton's latest remarks that way. Instead, I see Sen. Clinton trapped in an unforgiving episode of Iron Chef. Time is almost up, and she's got to make a meal out of the spare ingredients left. She's in too much of a rush to check if those mushrooms are poisonous. She grabbed the AP story listing the demographic groups that she is winning and ran down the list just as pundits have been doing for months.

Maybe I'm naive. Or maybe I think you have to have a little more proof before you claim someone's a cynical race-baiter. Exhaustion and desperation seem a more likely explanation for Clinton's dancing close to the white-vote land mine than more devilish motives. As Barack Obama has wisely said, we should give our exhausted candidates a break. (Of course, Clinton didn't give him a quarter when he bungled his characterization of people who live in small towns.)

As campaign veteran Joe Trippi explained to me months ago, the survival instinct that takes hold at the bitter end is not necessarily unique to the Clintons. After months and months of fighting, no one wants to give up. With no perspective or time for fear, you grab the weaponry at hand and keep fighting. So Clinton is arguing she's going to count Puerto Rican votes to show she's won the popular vote—even though Puerto Ricans can't participate in the general election. She'll whip off a PowerPoint presentation to show how she's won conservative districts. Everything will be pressed into service given the desperate state of things.

Perhaps the best reason it seems likely Clinton wasn't intentionally playing the race card is that she knows it would kill her chances at convincing superdelegates to back her. Roughly 250 of them are still staring out their windows in a rapturous state of ponder, thumbing Hamlet, and not making up their minds. Clinton has to somehow convince roughly 70 percent of them to support her. At the moment, they're heading in the other direction as quickly as these risk-averse party-types can go. Obama has won 80 percent of the more than 130 or so superdelegates that have picked a candidate since Super Tuesday. Since the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, he has raked in 14 to Clinton's three.

Clinton's chances are so narrow and flickering as to be almost nonexistent, but of those superdelegates with whom she might still have a chance, sensitivity to race and its potential to divide the party is a big issue. It may be the issue, according to some of her aides. The more Clinton appears to have benefited by playing the race card or benefiting from racism that exists but she didn't foment, the harder it will be for superdelegates to support her. At a personal level, they won't want to look like they are ratifying her racial politics or the racist behavior of white voters. They also know that if they don't choose Obama, and his supporters think race was the reason he didn't get the nomination, those voters will be lost to the party for the general election. Not only will blacks stay home, but liberals and the first-time voters Obama has attracted will do the same, disgusted with party fat cats sanctioning what they'll view as racist behavior.

This means Clinton may be past the point at which she can make her best case. It's true that she is beating Obama among a variety of demographic groups. In particular, she's thumping him soundly with white working-class men. There's little evidence this will translate into a problem for Obama in the general election—in the latest Diageo/Hotline poll, he does just as well as Clinton among whites against John McCain. Still, Clinton's argument along these lines is the best she has. The more she tries to make this case, though, the more she risks spooking the superdelegates. Assert that Obama can't win among whites or certain groups of whites often enough, and it just might stick in the heads of white voters that he's somehow irrevocably damaged. To avoid that tarnishing, superdelegates might move all the faster toward Obama, lest Clinton seriously harm the eventual nominee.

The debate over Clinton's tactics could be the next chapter in that national conversation about race Barack Obama talked about in his Pennsylvania speech in March. Of course, the last thing in the world the Obama campaign wants is a conversation about race now, when he's all but won the nomination. It's much easier, and politically smarter, for them to imply that the Clintons are playing the race card or to let the superdelegates come to that conclusion on their own. After the clock runs out, the expansive conversation about race can presumably start again.