Posted by Jed Lewison on Tue Apr 22, 2008 at 9:54 AM Pacific

Reason number #6,256 Bill Clinton hates YouTube

Bill Clinton got himself all caught up in another lie today, directly contradicted by his own words -- recorded yesterday.

Clinton was asked by an NBC reporter about his claim that Obama had played the race-card on him. Clinton's reponse was to deny ever having made the claim.  "No, no, no," he said. "That’s not what I said."

But a recording of his conversation with WHYY radio shows that Clinton did in fact make that very claim, saying:

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.

After Clinton thought he was off-air, he told a companion: "I don't think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?"

For the record, Obama himself actually never did racialize Clinton's remarks. Back in January, on This Week with George "The Little Patriot" Stephanopoulos, Obama was directly asked about Clinton's remarks and didn't call them racist or race-baiting.

I will say this, however -- however politically savvy they may have been, on a substantive basis, Obama was wrong: Bill Clinton's remarks were race-baiting.

For starters, in 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson participated in caucuses, not primaries. Secondly, in 2004, blacks in South Carolina passed over Al Sharpton in favor of John Edwards during the state's primary. To have compared Obama to Jackson was in no way relevant -- the only reason to do it was to try to reduce Obama to being nothing more than a shell of a human defined merely by the color of his skin.

And to be clear here, I'm not going out on some wild-tangent, reading between the lines. The Clinton campaign itself made the same exact point. Here's what AP's Ron Fournier said before voting began:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has won in South Carolina.

No, not Saturday's primary -- though it's no longer outside the realm of possibility that Clinton will defeat Barack Obama here. What she has won in South Carolina is the larger campaign to polarize voters around race and marginalize Obama (in the insidious words of one of her top advisers) as "The Black Candidate."

There you have it. The Clinton campaign itself claimed victory by framing Obama as "The Black Candidate" -- in it's own words. Now, they were of course foolishly wrong, but that's not the point. The point is that the Clinton campaign was involved in a systematic playing of the race card.

In my own view, the Clinton camp -- and Bill Clinton in particular -- attempted to racialize the campaign well before South Carolina. Here is Bill Clinton on Charlie Rose in mid-December, saying Barack Obama was a "symbol by his very nature":

Now if that's not a clear attempt to reduce Obama to the color of his skin, I don't know what is.

One other note -- Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign has referred to herself as a "woman" and to Barack Obama as "an African-American man." Note that while she is attributing both race and gender to his identity, she presents herself as merely a woman, as if she had no racial identity.

I understand how important identity is, but I'm not that big on making it a central feature of a political campaign. I'm especially sour on efforts define your opponent in such  way that it gives you a political advantage.

If Clinton wants to present herself as "the woman" candidate that's her right, but until Barack Obama starts going around starting off his stump speeches by saying he's running as a black man (as opposed to being a black man who is running), maybe Clinton should back off trying to define her opponent.

It is, after all, obvious why she frames things as she does -- nearly three-fifths of Democratic primary voters are female, while closer to one-tenth are African American men.

Just another example of the Clinton campaign's clumsy and ineffective use of identity politics. I'm so glad we're going to be closing the door on them.