God Made Dirt, Dirt Don't Hurt

Those dirty, dirty Clintons are about to be exposed, again, for the absolute power hungry critters they are.

At the moment I am a bit predisposed to be sympathetic with Barack Obama, because he's about to get slapped around in the press for the first time since his election. The walls of his Jericho health care bill are about to come tumbling down as Joshua Brown from Massachusetts blows his new senatorial horn. The Left netroots are calling him a traitor, and well, things are just all around bad for him. Fair, but bad.

One thing you might say is that Obama ran a more fair and clean campaign than his most important and venal rival, Hillary Clinton. While Obama dodged hyperbole with rapid, often backstabbing grace, he did have the advantage of being primarily defensive. Whereas the Clintons were, as always, offensive. 

This isn't the first time I've been sympathetic to Obama and it probably won't be the last. Of the many times before I said explicitly that the Wright fiasco was overkill. But on a higher level I saw the inherent conflict in the fake multiculturalism of the Democrats:

In the case of Obama vs Clinton, the entire 'black' agenda of the Democratic party has been hijacked by an African American candidate. And the fact that the Democrats have not materially offered anything to African Americans above and beyond their special racial interest groups status and the occasional faces in high places, rapidly becomes evident as the candidates compete for the African American vote. It is tragic that black voters have come to expect little more that multicultural lip service, but the fact that they have gotten Obama so quickly and so dramatically highlights the emptiness of the multicultural promise.

Whether or not Obama is willing or able to effect a change of agenda that more accurately addresses the true needs and concerns of African American voters is beside the point here. The fact is that now that he exists, now that he has demonstrated his viability as a candidate, without question, people are going to start asking if and why he's the only one. But most importantly, Obama has proven that the multicultural rhetoric has been empty. Whether or not the Democrats hyped him there, he *is* black power, and he's going to have to be put down forcibly if the Democrat power structure that the Clinton machine represents is to survive this election.

There are only two options, none of which is appetizing for that machine.

They will either disabuse their multicultural agenda by tacking towards the premise that Obama's race should not be considered and that where it counts, his skills and experience are most important. Then they go after him on skills and experience - which is an odd tack considering the other Democrats who were originally in the running many possessing much more skill and experience than the front runners. Or they find a way to marginalize his multicultural value by suggesting some equation like women + hispanics > black. Either way, African American and other voters who pay significant attention to this racial traffic are going to be pissed. The mendacity will be transparent, and that will stick to the Clintons and their Party like glue. A possible third way is to split the difference by offering a joint ticket. In that case, Obama becomes party to the old multicultural ethic and the game continues. But that's really just the first option all over again.

The Democrats on the whole may dig working their phony magic on those who pay for their conjuring, but the Clintons simply prefer bare knuckling it. Through surrogates of course. And so in the face of the two options, they went even lower. They kept dealing in racial traffic of the lowest sort. A new book is digging up the facts around this muck now just a year later. That was quick research - maybe because so much of it was transparent in the first place. Hitchens has a summary of the details.

4) Mention of Blumenthal brings me to the next point of shock in the narrative, where by mid-May 2008 the Clinton campaign is foundering hopelessly and beginning to rely on the desperate pitch to "superdelegates." Two things then happen: Bill Clinton plays the race card even more crudely, and Sidney Blumenthal claims that Michelle Obama has been caught on tape using the word whitey. To cite Heilemann and Halperin again:

Bill Clinton's main assignment was continuing to make phone calls to superdelegates, in which he pressed the case for Hillary and against Obama aggressively—at times, too aggressively. Clinton's message, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, was that the country wasn't ready to elect an African American president.

And then there's this:

Blumenthal was obsessed with the "whitey tape," and so were the Clintons, who not only believed that it existed but felt that there was a chance it might emerge in time to save Hillary. "They've got a tape, they've got a tape," she told her aides excitedly.

Ahh. The Whitey Tape. This was the October Surprise that everybody was talking about that never showed up. Well what do you know? 

I think it is instructive to remind people that it was not the Republicans who were knee deep in this crud, but the woman who is now Secretary of State. Thus the name of this blogpost. That's the kind of racial dirt that doesn't hurt the Democrats. They know how to sling it, dodge it, deny it, hype it and everything else.

I like the new favorite quote. The world doesn't need instruction so much as it needs reminding.

Oh yes, and I was being high minded. Notice how few of those questions were ever answered.