The fact that race and gender are playing important roles in this campaign should surprise no one. After all, this is the first time ever that the Democratic Party has had a black man and a white woman as the two leading candidates to win the presidential nomination.
For the most part, race and gender have played a positive role in the campaign, but since December, bit by bit, drip by drip, thing have moved towards ugly.
It all started with Bob Kerrey and Billy Shaheen, but Obama didn't bite. After New Hampshire, things worsened, and it wasn't entirely one-sided.
For example, just after Hillary made her dismissive assessment of MLK, Jesse Jackson, Jr. all but accused her not only of shedding crocodile tears in Portsmouth, but also of not caring about blacks in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Two days before Bob Johnson took the stage to attack Barack Obama in Charleston, one of Obama's press aides distributed a list of supposedly racially-insensitive statements uttered by the Clintons.
As a Nevadan, the protests that the Clintons were trying to disenfranchise minority voters on the Strip rang hollow, and apparently the workers there agreed. Meanwhile, the Culinary Union aired an incredibly divisive ad, accusing Hillary Clinton of having no respect for Hispanics. Moreover, the accusuations that the Clintons cheated the Nevada caucus seemed more like a talking point to mobilize blacks in South Carolina than anything grounded in reality.
Be that all as it may, I also thought it was just the back and forth of politics. A bit rough, yeah, but that's politics. Deal with it.
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Over the past week, however, the Clinton campaign has taken the racial element of this campaign to an entirely new -- and entirely unacceptable -- level, openly discussing a strategy to label Barack Obama as "the black candidate."
On Friday, they succeeded in getting AP political correspondent Ron Fournier to declare them victors in South Carolina before a single vote had been cast. Why? Because, according to Fournier, they were convinced they'd turned Barack Obama into, in their words, "the black candidate."
Yesterday, Bill Clinton added an exclamation point to the Clinton campaign message when -- unprompted -- he compared Barack Obama to Jesse Jackson.
What a sad and pathetic moment for President Clinton. If Hillary Clinton loses this campaign, it's a moment many of us will never forget.
Undoubtedly, Clinton will say he was just giving an example of Democrat who won South Carolina but lost the nomination.
But if that was the point our Rhodes scholar former president was trying to make, then a much better example would have been John Edwards who won the primary, but lost the nomination. When Jackson won, South Carolina was a caucus state.
Clinton's meaning was clear; there can be no doubt.
I don't know the intricacies of the Clintons' strategy, but this much is clear: they think that by polarizing the electorate along racial lines, they can win this election.
It wasn't just about making Barack Obama "the black candidate." They wanted to make him "the candidate of blacks" -- in the process making Hillary Clinton "the candidate of whites."
In short, the Clintons sought to divide us, the American people, to satisfy their agenda.
Divide and conquer.
Win at all costs.
I love winners. I love politicians who will fight with every part of their being, who are willing to savage their opponent to win.
But I can't abide by politicians who, in the name of achieving power, sacrifice the very people they are supposed serve.
No.
No way.
We can't let them do this to our country.
© Jed Lewison