A Bigoted Lie

Frank Rich's NY Times column today is very tough on the Clintons. He lays out the case for how, once the black vote started to turn towards Obama, the Clintons simply turned away from them, began using racial politics in courting white and especially Hispanic voters. This included, according to Rich, a bigoted lie.

Rich began the column by describing a televised event that few people paid any attention to but which he watched--the Hillary "national town hall" on the Hallmark channel that she promoted at the end of the last debate. He observed how carefully scripted it was, that it included few African Americans--and none among those asking the questions. Later in the column (with my emphasis):

"But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”"

Knowing even before Super Tuesday that the remaining contests aren't likely to yield a majority for either candidate, the Clintons (Rich writes) cynically reversed her previous position on the primaries in Michigan and Florida, and will try to change the rules after the game was played in order to secure those delegates. The furor over that possibility is already building within the party--and I certainly find it an even more outrageous injustice than the super-delegate system. Dem chair Howard Dean is trying to forestall a party-rending battle over this. But, Rich concludes:

But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

I have to say I've come to the same conclusion. That's why I'm afraid the campaigns in Ohio and Texas may get very, very ugly. Especially behind the scenes.