The Clinton campaign’s “other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich observes in today’s issue.
“In October, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought.
“In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), ‘the black candidate’ (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself). The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote.
“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.”