In yet another Clintonian moment, the former President went off on a public radio host this morning when asked about his comments the morning of the South Carolina primary. In a vigorous defense of his comments in which he accused Barack Obama's campaign of playing the race card against him, he concluded by saying, when he thought he was off mike:
I don’t think I can take any shit from anybody on that, do you?
Y'know, I was going to write a diary today titled "Jumping the Shark," because regardless of what happens in PA today, this primary campaign jumped the shark long ago. But, as it turned out, the former President jumped the shark for me.
Some choice snippets from this morning's interview:
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.
First, where are these campaign memos he is talking about? That was out of left field.
Second, he said all that in South Carolina? Really? Because this is what he said on the videotape:
I realize the Clintons have had trouble with videotape recently (see Tuzla-gate), but no matter. Maybe he DID say all those things in that interview...or at least in his own mind.
Clinton continues:
"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."
Ah yes, it's the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black defense. The Clintons are furiously trying to defend their legacy, not because the race card was played on them, but because they have been subtlely playing the race card all along, to no avail. The message that "Obama can't win in the general" ever so subtlely injects race into the campaign.
Then the final coup de grace:
"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."
Here is where the President gets it wrong. I don't think he's a racist, and I doubt many people do. But when you start projecting the Geraldine Ferraro defense of "they played the race card on me," it doesn't exactly help your image. The fact remains that no matter what is said, many of the former President's comments about Obama were made in the context of being the "black candidate." Not racist, perhaps, but definitely a political strategy designed to project race.
The most disturbing thing is the continued revisionism of what was actually said. Just like the "mistake" Hillary made "late one night" about Bosnia, so too apparently are the President's own words subject to continuing revisionism.
Perhaps the saddest thing to watch in this whole bout is that the Clintons still don't realize that Barack Obama is capturing a new kind of politics in a bottle, and truth be told, the Clintons are overtaken by the circumstances. And win or lose today, the old way of doing things, the Rovian way of doing things, is proving to have lost a lot of steam.
So sorry, Mr. President, if you had to take shit about it.
But that's usually what is flung back at you when you fling it about yourself.
You can listen to the full Clinton interview here:
