The Clintons may not be racists, but the sure seem to be sticking their feet in it this election. While Hillary Clinton struck many of the right notes in her public apology, Bill seems to be right up to the same tactics in his CNN interview, dated Monday morning.
At this point, as the expression goes, they are either lying or stupid.
Lets start with calling the Obama campaigns tactics a "mugging". It isn't hard to see how that plays into racist perceptions of young black men, but I can't understand how it even makes sense as an analogy. Does Bill Clinton actually think that the office of president "belongs" to him and his wife, and that taking the nomination, even if it were by dirty, underhanded tactics, would be stealing what is Hillary's rightful property?
But it doesn't end there:
"It's been pretty well established. Charlie Rangel, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in unequivocal terms in South Carolina that no one in our campaign played any race card, that we had some played against us but we didn't play any," Clinton told CNN's Sean Callebs in New Orleans over the weekend.
Charlie Rangel is an American hero, but he does not speak for all African Americans on all subjects. You cannot make a problem with the black community go away by saying, "Here, ____ is black and they agree with me". Sorry, it will take more than that.
"Once African-Americans understood that they had a candidate with a serious chance to win the nomination and perhaps the presidency, then it was going to be a question of somewhere between 80 percent and 90 percent were going to support him except in areas where she had particularly strong profile," he said.
Bull. Shit. Black voters will not "automatically" vote for black candidates any more than white voters will. They are not "reverse-racists" and they are not sheep. You could see this earlier in the campaign when black voters were fairly evenly split between the candidates. Bill is going for this angle because it is the only explanation for the plummet in black support for Hillary other than the obvious one: that she has been running a racist dog-whistle campaign and black voters know it.
If Bill wants to heal wounds, he is going to have to do better than blaming the victims.