Delaying That Dialog On Race

Are we ready for that national dialog on race yet? If and when we start it, can we put on the required reading list Hanna Rosin's American Murder Mystery from The Atlantic

The story turns on the rising crime rate in mid-sized cities (500,000 to 1 million population) -- a stat that's counter to the flat crime rates in the big cities. In Memphis TN, for example, the violent crime rate's been rising at 20 percent annually.

And it didn't take too long before a hint of a topic for the national dialog on race began to form up:

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? [Police Lt. Doug] Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

It is, of course, that the crime wave has a black engine -- and because Memphis politicians need the black vote, they would rather stick their heads in the sand. Good idea; a gunshot wound to the buttocks is less life-threatening than one to the head.

The story behind the Memphis stats is fascinating, so I'll pull a rather long quote from the story:

About five years ago, [criminologist Richard] Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

The process of tearing down the projects and moving the (primarily black) residents to more affluent (primarily white) neighborhoods started carefully; in fact, no projects were torn down. Fewer than 200 families were picked for relocation and screened to find the motivate families with fewer than five children. Not surprisingly, the results were very good -- more kids finishing school, families rising out of poverty.

Also not surprisingly, the media leaped on it, turning the resulting ACLU book, Waiting for Gautreaux, into the prophetic tome of leftist social meddling.

And not surprisingly, given the impatience of the left, what followed was the wholesale destruction of housing projects and accompanying relocation of all their residents -- not just the motivated, relatively low childbirth ones.

And finally, not surprisingly at all, what followed was bunny rabbits in Memphis. Memphis is now the fourth most violent mid-sized city in America, and think demolition of housing projects when you consider the three ranked worse, from third to first: Baltimore, Washington DC, Detroit. (Rosin found other stats that placed Memphis "at the very top.")

How did the leaders of Memphis respond to the data? Predictably, not well:

Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he’s still not moved. “You’ve already marginalized people and told them they have to move out,” he told me irritably, just as he’s told Betts. “Now you’re saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That’s a really, really unfair assessment. You’re putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that’s, quote-unquote, criminal.”

To Lipscomb, it's the data -- the reality -- that's criminal, not the splashes of red throughout the bunny's ears. It's the studies of black behavior that is criminal, not the behavior of blacks.

Is America ready for a dialog on race?

Of course, housing -- whether the projects of old or the suburban Section 8 apartments of today -- isn't the problem. Neither is race, per se.

My mother-in-law owned several apartments in Redding CA and did all she could not to rent to Section 8 renters -- who were mostly white or Hispanic there -- because they simply were more destructive and problematic than routine renters. Part of the Memphis crime problem is the result of the welfare, statist society the Left has succeeded in building in America.

And certainly, the uniquely black propensity to out of wedlock birth -- another residue of the ravages statism has caused in the black community -- has a lot to do with it. Rosin never mentions this in her article. Rather, she dwells on the difficulty project residents have getting acclimated to new neighborhoods, particularly those who weren't motivated to leave the projects, and ignores the fact that the families she writes about are mom and kid families, not mom and dad and kid families.

This is almost a taboo subject among liberals. For example, when recent stats on unwed births came out, the NYT trumpeted it as good news:

The birth rate for unmarried black women, long a focal point in the debate over the causes of poverty among African-Americans, has reached its lowest point in 40 years, Federal health officials said today.

According to figures compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 74.4 births per 1,000 unmarried black women in 1996 -- the last year for which complete data are available. That rate is significantly below the peak of 90.7 per 1,000 unmarried black women reached in 1989.

Buried 12 paragraphs down was the stat that the unwed birthrate among non-Hispanic whites was a still shocking but comparatively minuscule 21.5 percent.

In the face of all this, most of America wants to react like Memphis' housing director: Don't talk to me about race because I don't want to blame statism and I don't want to criticize black social behavior, even if it is destructive.

hat-tip: Jim

Caution: White Guy Blogging

So I've been scrutinized, and that's who I am!

I hate blacks and I hate women. I've got all the power. I cannot be relied on. I have a terrible temper, and I'm fine with having it.

Funny, that's not what I feel, act or think like, but Nora Ephron writing at Huffpo sums up white men in so many words, so it must be so.

No one will call Ephron anything derogatory and overused to the point of meaninglessness -- racist, sexist -- for denigrating me and my white male brothers as terribly as she has, but that's OK; we expect it. It just comes with having all the power, you know.

Since the Dems have been running icons this election season, they've ended up where they deserve to end up, even if Ephron isn't crazy about it:

Here's another thing I don't like about this primary: now that there are only two Democratic candidates, it's suddenly horribly absolutely crystal-clear that this is an election about gender and race.

You could say it's an election about the economy and the war, but what fun would that be? Why focus on vital things when it's much more fun to call people names -- or accuse others of calling people names, or accuse their spouses of calling people names?

But when you run a race like the Dems have run, which as a Dem you have to do because identity politics is what you are, you end up with results like this; you end up running a race that means nothing because the only difference between the candidates is sex, race and age.

And for some reason, they've left age out of it. Until after the primaries, when they face that old white guy.

I might just be an insensitive, out of touch white guy, but it seems to me that it doesn't matter if the president is a man, a woman, a black or a white or anything else. What matters is policy and position -- not about race and gender, but about things that actually matter.

You'd think it would be the Dems that are saying that, but it's not. It's me, the GOP white guy, because they're fixated on the genetic matter of two individuals instead of where their policies will take us.

That leaves us white men, and all the intelligent people who join us in this effort, to think not of race or gender, but of the future, and to vote from our brains, not our hearts, skin or our sex organs. It's unfortunate, really, that all the power still resides in my white male brothers in Pennsylvania and Indiana, but that's the card they've been dealt by the Dems.

America's great talk on race never happened. Blacks will vote overwhelmingly for Obama. Older white women will vote overwhelmingly for Clinton. What a shame that is. I think what Ephron meant to say was this: White Dem men in Pennsylvania and Indiana will actually be voting about what matters, while most of the blacks and women will be voting about symbols that really don't matter at all.

OK, they matter. But only if you're a sexist or a racist.

Update: For a much more intelligent article on the issue, read this one at the other CSM.

Is Obama Ready For A Dialog On Race?

The wonders of the Internet! It lets me go to memeorandum to see a compilation of news from around the world and bloggers' comments on it, and launching from there, I go from my breakfast nook in South Orange County to Pittsburgh and the student newspaper from Carnegie Mellon U., a paper I would never have read were it not for the Internet.

And there, in coverage of an off-off-mainline political event featuring Michelle Obama and a smallish crowd of supporters, I find that the Obamas are not ready for a truthful dialog on race in this country, no matter what Barack Obama said in his flag-saturated speech on race. Truth, it seems, is no where to be found.

While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”

“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”

Of course, this is standard political showmanship, the carefully constructed crowd. No one ugly in the front row. And not too many blacks in front -- they might scare away white voters. (Unless it's a white candidate, then it's not too many whites in front.)

If Obama were indeed a change-engine instead of just an ultra-liberal hack in change clothing, he would let the people who cared the most be the people framing the shot. Instead, each stop is carefully orchestrated to create a sense of comfort, trust and normalcy, while in fact it is staged, false and contrived.

So this is our great new dialog on race made possible by Obama? I thought so. It's the kind of dialog unsubstantial candidates really like: One between carefully selected, like-minded people.

Those of us who think differently -- who think race is not of great consequence, who think huge government solves nothing, who know we'll never tax our way to paradise -- well, we'll fare worse than the Asian gal above. We won't just be moved from the back row; we won't be let into the room.

Two Black Americas, Two White Americas

For one heck of a heart-stopping look at America today, look no further than today's op/ed page of WaPo and the columns by Charles Krauthammer and Eugene Robinson.

Krauthammer's piece, The Fabulist vs. The Saint, shows us a white America paralyzed by fear of black America. No, not fear that we'll be mugged or our wimmin will be violated, but fear that we may say something that displeases our black co-citizens. After showing the media's glee to jump on Hillary's well deserved fate ("her Waterloo at Tuzla"), Krauthammer turns to the flag-bedecked Obama race speech:

This invitation to move on, as it were, has been widely accepted. After the speech it became an article of faith that even referring to Wright's comments was somehow illegitimate, the new "Swift-boating."

It is not just that Obama surrogate Rep. George Miller denounced the Clinton campaign for bringing up Wright when talking to superdelegates as trying to "work the low road." You expect that from a campaign. Or that Andrew Sullivan called Hillary's commenting on Wright "a new low." You expect that from Andrew Sullivan.

But from the mainstream media? As National Review's Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is "legitimate" for her to have remarked "that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost" or the kind of "generic comments [Wright] made about white America," Anderson Cooper, the show's host and alleged moderator, interjected that since "we all know what the [Wright] comments were," he found it "amazing" and "funny" that Davis should "feel the need to repeat them over and over again."

Davis protested, "It's appropriate." Time magazine's Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with "Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the -- you're spreading the poison right now," and then suggested that an "honorable person" would "stay away from this stuff."

Honorable people don't criticize hate-spewing black pastors and black presidential candidates who sat their families in front of the spew for 20 years. Why? Because honorable whites don't diss anything about blacks, apparently. In public anyway.

Of course, Hillary's campaign has every right to bring the matter up because it goes to the question of Obama's ability to reason, act and live in a manner we have come to expect of the men who have put on George Washington's mantle. But the discussion is off limits not just because Obama is black, but more so because the white liberal elite think Rev. Wright is right.

But he's wrong. Robinson doesn't say as much in his op/ed, Two Black Americas, but the black America that he paints says it loud and clear. While he talks about successful blacks and blacks in poverty today, that's not the two black Americas he's talking about. Rather, it is the black America of Martin Luther King and the black America of today.

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed -- mostly for the better -- and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized.

On April 4, 1968, it was possible to make the generalization that being black in this country meant being poor; fully 40 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line, according to census data, with another 20 percent barely keeping their heads above water. African Americans were heavily concentrated in the inner cities and the rural South. We were far less likely than whites to go to college, and our presence in the corporate world was minimal.

Robinson acknowledges that 25% of blacks today are mired in poverty, and because the better-off blacks don't have generations of money and success behind them, they're a bit more nervous about their success, but:

• African Americans control $800 billion in purchasing power, which, if translated into gross domestic product, would make a sovereign "Black America" the 15th- or 16th-richest nation on earth.
  
  
• Not even 2% of black households 40 years ago earned the equivalent of $100,000 a year in today's dollars. Now, about 10% of black households do.
  
  
• In many cities, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than within the city limits.
  
  
• The grandson of a slave was chairman of Merrill-Lynch until he resigned in the wake of the mortgage meltdown, "and floated back to earth with the help of one of the loveliest golden parachutes Wall Street has seen."

These probably aren't the people who make up most of Rev. Wright's congregation, which I've heard it referred to as an "inner city black" congregation. If that is indeed the case, it may be like this group described by Robinson:

For those who haven't made it into the middle class, however, things are different. Inner-city communities were hollowed out -- a process accelerated by the riots that followed King's death -- and left fallow for decades. Middle-class professionals fled, businesses closed, schools disintegrated, family structures fell apart. Drugs and crime were symptoms of the general rot ...

Such people could well respond positively to Wright's hate speech about white America, but they would be better served by a pastor who encourages them to join the middle class. Wright, however, preaches that the middle class is a cop out and counter to black liberation.

Obama stuck with a church that, as near as we can tell from Wright's sermons, demonized the 75% of blacks who were successful. As a man who wanted to be the president of America, he should have been doing all he could to see other blacks achieve the financial security he and Michelle enjoyed. That's what we expect as Americans.

Obama's judgment went haywire, or the whole sitting in the pew thing was just a sham that didn't require much thought -- yet the media wants to be done with the whole affair, leading me to the conclusion that there are two white Americas: The one that is comfortable with race, and the one that is so uncomfortable with it, they would rather not talk about it -- proving my long-held theory that Obama is benefiting from racial Teflon, to the detriment of every candidate he faces.

Obama's Race Speech And The Racial Divide

Let's see if I'm tracking this Wright right.

Obama goes to church for 20 years with a guy who says America got what it deserved on 9/11, forces drugs on blacks and should be damned by God.

Eyebrows go up and support for Mr. Change softens.

Obama gives a big speech, for once surrounded by flags he has shunned to date, sort of as if Rev. Wright had resigned as his policy chief on stage sets.

Pres. Clinton says, in light of all this, "I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country."

And for even raising the question that a guy who won't wear a flag, sometimes doesn't put his hand over his heart, and refuses to leave an unpatriotic church may be something less than the American patriotic ideal, Clinton gets called a McCarthyite by a retired general who serves on Obama's staff.

If it weren't the Dem party, I wouldn't think it could be true, but true it is -- as true as the story that Fox News anchor Brian Killmeade walked of the set, complaining of too much Obama-bashing. That's Fox, the whipping boy of the Left.

(As for that last point, Fox News has been on in the background for hours a day here at our in-laws home, and I am Wright-wrung; I don't care to see another clip of him, ever. I haven't seen what's on the other networks, but I told Incredible Wife last night that Fox is driving people back to Obama by overplaying this story.)

So it's a wild story, one that can get out of focus quickly. As a public service, C-SM provides this refocusing moment: The story is about how race relations might influence the 2008 election.

The story has provided a finely tuned measure of the depth of the racial divide that remains in America four decades after the Civil Rights movement's victory. Just look at these stats, courtesy of Rassmussen:

• 84% of those polled said they had heard at least part of the speech. Whoa. Do you think race is an important topic in America? Do you doubt that Obama has generated high levels of interest in politics?
• Of those, 51% ranked the speech good or excellent, 26% said it was fair, and 21% said it stunk.
• Yes, there was the traditional party split in the results: 67% of the Dems who heard it liked it, along with 53% of the Independents and 31% of the Republicans.
• And here's the kicker: Rassmussen found that 86% of the black voters thought it was good or excellent, but only 45% of the white voters. That's nearly two-to-one.

The black/white split is the biggest of all, saying that a racial divide still exists in America, and that a "patriotic" black is different from a "patriotic white." Just listen to the scathing condescention in Rev. Wright's voice -- and the boisterous affirmations from the congregation -- when he mentions Condeleeza Rice, Colin Powell or Clarence Thomas. Success in the white world is no success for Rev. Wright's audience; it is fighting the other man's fight, sleeping with the enemy.

If you revile Rice, Powell and Thomas for their success, then you must view Obama's success as a success of a different stripe: A success in beating the white man's world. And you are not electing Obama as a person of unity, but a person who will accentuate the difference and refuse to be the sort of bridge at least Rice and Powell have been, and Thomas should have been.

It's as if there were two primaries going on in the Democratic party -- one of whites choosing between two options in the politics of identity, and one of blacks, voting overwhelmingly for a man who resonates for them this message: We are not a part of you, white America, and we don't really want to be.

If you say that's not exactly patriotism, then you're condemned (poor, poor Bill!), and you shake your head, whether it happens to be dark-skinned or fair, and realize that you're a part of a party that's not yet ready for racial harmony.

And you might think, maybe the GOP, which isn't so much about identity politics, might be the better place for me.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Uneven Fields

Geraldine Ferraro:

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

Rev. Jeremiah White:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people."

White is talking about a white government, not a black government. This is clearly a statement about race.

Ferraro:

"Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up."

White:

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Hillary Clinton immediately distanced herself from Ferraro ...

"I certainly do repudiate it and I regret deeply that it was said. Obviously she doesn't speak for the campaign, she doesn't speak for any of my positions, and she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee."

... and before the end of the first day of full-blown media frenzy, she was sacked from her position in the Clinton campaign.

I've just scanned the Brietbart U.S. politics headlines, and there's no big news story about Obama apologizing for his pastor, quitting the church, and urging us all to have a big group hug. That could come tomorrow, or Obama may try to say it's not fair to have a "religious test" for him, any more than it was for Mitt Romney. But Romney's church is a church, not an ongoing racist political rally under the guise of weekly sermons.

Granted, the same quick fate that met Ferraro met Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power after she called Hillary a monster, she was canned, and Obama issued a statement distancing himself from her. But Power didn't ist-speak -- nothing racist, nothing sexist -- just something in crushingly bad taste.

Now, if Ferraro had used rhetoric in the style of Rev. Wright, her comments would have been more along the line that because Obama is black, he sells crack, has a long rap sheet with prison time, and is a sexual threat to decent white women everywhere.

And even though we all know what Powers said is a pretty accurate characterization of the junior senator from New York, it was far short of what she would have said if mimicking Rev. Wright's style. After all, he said the 9/11 victims got what they deserved.

Obama had to know this was coming. He's sat in the church and has heard the sermons. He knows that the preaching there pushes blacks away from America, as Victor Davis Hansen said in delightful understatement:

Most who could sit through those diatribes and venom each week might find it difficult to have a balanced view of so-called “white” people or the country at large.

Yet Obama, knowing America's double standard when it comes to race speak, didn't bother to distance himself from Wright, other than saying the Rev. sometimes gets wound up and is a bit of a crazy uncle. Well, you can't leave a crazy uncle; he's family. But you can leave a church, and should if the teachings are inflammatory and make you uncomfortable.

If this blows over without doing serious damage to Obama, without changing the media's go-light coverage of him, we know that what I've been worrying about is true: The GOP will not be able to challenge Obama without cries of "Racist! Racist!" from every corner.

Or "Sexist! Sexist!" if Hillary wins the nomination.

The Audacity Of Hype

The race card hyping of the last few days is evolving, allowing us to see the Obama campaign as it is: audacious, hard-hitting, sophisticated, unrelenting and more than a little nasty.

Follow the dance steps:

First, a memo from the Obama staff makes the rounds -- very thoughtful, strategic, rounds -- laying out the race card to attack Clinton on the eve of a key Southern primary in South Carolina, and on the set-up of several primaries -- New York, Michigan, Florida -- where blacks can be the the key to victory.

Then, Obama appears to endorse the content of the memos, but with words carefully scripted to separate him just enough that he doesn't look like a slimy slammer.

Then today, sensing that the damage has been done, a magnanimous Obama tells the press that there's nothing to the story that the Clintons are something less than stellar supporters of the black agenda -- it's just something that's been "played out in the press. It's not my view." As if his camp didn't start it all.

And finally, in the same comments, he reinforces the two incidents -- the white man was needed to pass the Civil Rights Act and his campaign is a "fairy tale" -- restating them one more time before saying they show a deeper fault in Clinton than a mere racial blind spot.

Audacious, hard-hitting, sophisticated, unrelenting and more than a little nasty.

Here's how Obama, on ABC News, dealt with the Lyndon Johnson/Civil Rights Act kerfuffle his campaign created and laid at Clinton's feet:

Sen. Barack Obama told ABC News Monday there is nothing in Sen. Hillary Clinton's record that would give him any cause for concern about her in terms of racial politics.

The magnanimous Mr. Obama.

Asked how Obama interpreted two recent remarks by the Clintons that prompted an angry reaction from some in the Black community, Obama sought to damp down the racial dynamics of the controversy.

What a clean campaigner!

Many African Americans were offended when Hillary Clinton told an interviewer in New Hampshire, "Martin Luther King's dream became a reality when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

Some say she seemed to suggest that it took a white politician to fulfill a black man's dream.

Yeah, but would it have been such a big deal without Obama's people hyping it?

"I don't think it was in any way a racial comment," Obama told ABC News. "That's something that has played out in the press. That's not my view."

"Not my view," but not "Not my memo."

But, he said, the comment was revealing about her political character. "I do think it was indicative of the perspective that she brings, which is that what happens in Washington is more important than what happens outside of Washington," he said.

He said he believes the quote betrays a belief on her part, "that the intricacies of the legislative process were somehow more significant than when ordinary people rise up and march and go to jail and fight for justice."

In the interview, he handles Bill's "fairy tale" comment in a similar manner: The jaw-crusher has already been delivered by his staff, so Obama generously, kindly minimizes the hit, while subtly reminding us of it so the sting won't go away.

Remind you of someone? Hillary Clinton, perhaps?

And speaking of Hillary, has all this deft maneuvering hurt Ms. Inevitable at all? Glad you asked:

NEW YORK, NY -- Dogged by continuing racial tensions around her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton drew a smattering of boos on Monday when she spoke at a religiously tinged Martin Luther King Jr. rally put together by a union organizing predominantly black security workers.

The catcalls came when Clinton was introduced and her speech drew only tepid applause compared to the boisterous ovations drawn by many of the pastors and reverends — not to mention a hip-hop artist and slam poet — who took the podium before her. ...

Even though the event was billed as a rally for an SEIU affiliate celebrating King’s legacy and Clinton was a late-addition, the less-than-enthusiastic reception was still noteworthy. It took place in Clinton’s backyard and came as she is making extensive efforts to put the kibosh on the racially tinged controversy swirling around her campaign. (The Politico)

There was a day when a black union rally in New York would have been a raucously pro-Hillary affair. That day was about a week ago. But today, the woman who is the wife of "America's first black president," the woman who utterly dominated the black vote when running for Senate, finds herself just before the big black primaries getting the cold shoulder.

All that affected drawling ...

clipped from www.youtube.com

...for nothing.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Obama Plays The Race Card ... GOP, Beware!

How quickly political time flies. It seems like only yesterday the rap on Barack Obama was that he isn't black enough to get the black vote. Maybe it was dancing with white chicks that solved this problem, maybe not, but now he's suddenly black enough to play the race card against Clinton -- a preview of what he'll do (pardon the expression) in spades against the GOP if he gets the nomination.

HuffPo was among the outlets this a.m. spilling the contents of an Obama race card memo:

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign has prepared a detailed memo listing various instances in which it perceived Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign to have deliberately played the race card in the Democratic primary.

The memo, which was obtained by the Huffington Post and has been made public elsewhere, is believed to have been given to an activist and contains mostly excerpts from different media reports. It lists the contact info and name of Obama's South Carolina press secretary, Amaya Smith, and is broken down into five incidents in which either Clinton, her husband Bill, or campaign surrogates made comments that could be interpreted as racially insensitive.

The document provides an indication that, in private, the Obama campaign is seeking to capitalize on the view - and push the narrative - that the Clintons are using race-related issues for political leverage. In public, the Obama campaign has denied that they are trying to propagate such a perception, noting that the document never was sent to the press.

But irrespective of the memo, the image of the Clinton campaign sowing racial discord did bubble to the surface following a series of comments made this past week. On Friday, Bill Clinton called into multiple African American radio shows, including one hosted by Al Sharpton, to tamp down backlash against him for calling Obama's candidacy a "fairy tale."

All of a sudden "America's first black president" is just a race-baiter because he used the words "fairy tale" in a sentence about Obama! (Shouldn't he be a gay-baiter, really?) If Bill Clinton can get painted with this nasty brush, imagine what the powers of black victimization would do to Romney, McCain or Huckabee!

Am I overstating the case? Well, read Clinton's remarks in context and see:

"It is wrong that Senator Obama got to go through 15 debates trumpeting his superior judgment and how he had been against the war in every year," said Clinton, "and never got asked one time, not once, 'Well, how could you say, that when you said in 2004 you didn't know how you would have voted on the resolution? You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war and you took that speech you're now running on off your website in 2004 and there's no difference in your voting record and Hillary's ever since?' Give me a break.

"This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen..."

Anyone who sees a racial comment in that is the true racist, because he (and I'll use "he" because this is coming out of Obama's camp) sees race everywhere.

Hillary also got nailed by a black man for saying that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights Act passed -- which is, politically speaking, the truth. Johnson knew how to work Congress, particularly the old Southern Dem racist members, to get it done. But she committed the sin of not doing the mandatory genuflect to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, even though they had nothing to do with the political gamesmanship Hillary was referring to.

Whatever the Clintons' motivations in their cozying up to black voters, they don't deserve what they're getting from the Obama campaign. As the primaries in the Southern States are upon us, it's obvious that Obama's people are pulling out all the stops to push black voters away from the Clinton machine and into the now black enough arms of Obama.

If the strategy works, we'll know it soon enough ... and we'll know what's in store when Obama begins campaigning against the party of the Great Emancipator.

hat-tip: memeorandum and a hat-tip to Incredible Daughter #3 for suggesting the Ellen photo