yesterday I wrote about Eugene Robinson's column about Hillary Clinton, in which he described her as arrogant but not a racist. Today we see two more prominent black columnists also unload on her, again neither choosing to call her a racist, but each being more than a little dismissive. Let me offer a brief clip from each above the fold.
From Derrick Jackson's Clinton's diminishing of black voters:
There is no way you can say in the same sentence, "hard-working Americans, white Americans," without diminishing black Americans as lazy.
And from Bob Herbert's Seeds of Destruction his first line:
The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.
I will somewhat explore each column and also offer a few words of my own.
The Jackson first.
The truth is that Clinton is in denial about one of the key reasons for her slide from inevitability. She choked on the black vote. Conveniently forgotten in her reinvention in Pennsylvania as Rocky Balboa (who conveniently was a white working-class boxer trying to beat down a black champion), is that this white woman led Obama in an October 2007 CNN poll, 68 percent to 25 percent among black women and was nearly dead even with Obama among black men.
This is a data heavy column. Jackson says that Democrats have not solved the white problem since Jimmy Cater's 48% in 1976. I would note that the last time any Democrat won a MAJORITY of the white vote was LBJ in 1964. Bringing it closer to home, Jackson writes that
Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 in three-way races with a grand total of 39 percent of the white vote and 83 percent of the black vote and 61 percent of the Hispanic vote
Perhaps that is why Jackson finds it strange to see Clinton
playing "divide and doubt" about Obama getting "only" 37 percent of the white vote in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and 40 percent in Indiana.
Jackson closes with a final brief paragraph worth noting:
Ironically, Obama got to where he is by not being the "black" candidate. It is Clinton who is now the race candidate, diminishing black voters and eggheads, her final hopes resting on the thinnest of eggshells.
And given the narrowing of any potential coalition on behalf of Clinton, for me at least her rhetoric about her being the only one who could put together a coalition to defeat John McCain flies in the face of the evidence.
It is Bob Herbert who decides to really lay the wood to Clinton. Perhaps it is his indirect way of noting that she has in fact NOT been fully vetted. He throws Hillary Clinton's words that there is a pattern emerging back at her to look at the patterns one can see in both her husband and her. More about that anon, but note this brief stretch, which begins with the implied message of Clinton's recent remarks:
He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!
The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.
(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: "I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.")
THAT DUMB - powerful words indeed from one of Clinton's most prominent and important African-American supporters. And Herbert rightly points out that it is also an insult to many white working-class voters. He does not say, but I would note, that this is far more insulting than the "bitter" and "cling to their religion" remarks about which HRC raised such a stink when Obama's San Franciso words became public knowledge. Herbert rightly notes that
to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
But that is not the heart of Herbert's criticisms. Having said all this, he reminds how unvetted the Clintons really are. He walks us through the very end of Bill's second terms. That means the pardon scandals, with Hillary's brothers Hugh and Tony Rodham getting paid large amounts of money to help people obtain pardons, and Hillary's passing on an envelope that she claimed into which she never looked, that she just passed them on.
I am tempting to view her words in this case as the Sergeant Schultz defense - for those who do not remember "Hogan's Heroes" - set in an imaginary POW camp in Germany in WWII, the guard with whom the POWs most often interacted was noted for frequently asserting "I know nothing. Nothing!" It becomes a little ridiculous that someone who claims to have been a key player in her husband's White House would have no knowledge of the actions of her own brothers in dealing with that White House. Either she is not being truthful about the pardons, or else she greatly exaggerated her role in that White House or - and I now tend to think this is the case - both sets of statements are untrue, in which case one must question how anyone can depend upon the veracity of anything she might say.
Herbert goes further than this, reminding his readers that at the end of the term the Clintons had a further problem with furniture and other items improperly taken from the White House that had to be returned and of gifts for which only after a furor erupted did they decide to reimburse for the value of the gifts. Reading the words from Herbert I wondered if it is something common in Arkansan politicians, remembering the Huckabee's gift registry to furnish their new residence at the end of his term as governor. But I don't want to smear an entire state, and by contrast at least rock-playing Governor Mike was graceful in his campaign as he hopes of winning began to slip away, something perhaps Hillary should learn.
Herbert does put it in context. After laying out the record of inappropriate behavior even beyond the pardons, he writes about as bluntly as he can, and to me those words show the clear difference between the apparent graciousness of Mike Huckabee and what we are now seeing from both Clintons and their surrogates:
So class is not a Clinton forte.
But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.
The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.
Read those last two sentences, that brief paragraph, one more time. Ponder them. For me they represent an epitaph for the Clinton legacy, except that an epitaph should remind people of the good the deceased they honor. We are yet again reminded not of what Bill Clinton may have accomplished - which unfortunately was quite disappointing given his considerable political gifts - but rather of the failings that so undermined his presidency.
Three of the most prominent Black columnists have, in the past two days, made clear that the actions of the Clintons in this campaign have now gone so far as to place them beyond the pale of acceptance by many thinking people, especially but not exclusively in the Black community. They write for three of the most important newspapers in the nation: Robinson for the Washington Post, Jackson for the Boston Globe, and Herbert for the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times. And if Clinton continues on her current apparent kamikaze mission, she is likely to find that the criticisms they offer are just the beginning of what they will encounter. Already newspaper editorial boards are writing similar things, and increasingly major politicians are finding ways to distance themselves from what is occurring.
I wish it were not so, but I think Herbert's final words may be the most appropriate I have read recently:
The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.
Peace.