And, personally, I'm all for letting bygones be bygones to further unity to defeat the odious John McCain.
Just right after setting the record straight on the gutter appeals to bigotry that Hillary Clinton and her most trusted advisers launched into the political campaign.
Sunday's NYT's retrosective by PETER BAKER and JIM RUTENBERG offers these nuggets:
... Backed by Bill Clinton, Mr. (Mark) Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s 'lack of American roots,' referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word 'American' — she should talk about the 'American century' and her 'American Strategic Energy Fund,' and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested. ...
When Mr. Clinton referred publicly to Mr. Obama as a 'kid,' Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, recalled in an interview that a fellow black congressman said, 'I don’t know why he didn’t just call him ‘boy’ and get it over with.'
In private, Mr. Clinton was making matters worse. On the night of the South Carolina primary, Mr. Clinton called and Mr. Clyburn said he told him to tone down his rhetoric against Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton responded by calling him a rude name that Mr. Clyburn would not repeat in an interview. Mr. Clinton called back a few days later for what Mr. Clyburn called 'a much more pleasant conversation,' but the damage was done. 'Clinton was using code words that most of us in the South can recognize when we hear that kind of stuff,' Mr. Clyburn said.
When the chips were down, Clinton did not hesitate to appeal to the most vile aspects of the American political culture. Below is a reposting of a piece from March 12, 2008 on Hillary's racist appeals; in which, in a phrase, she sought to portray herself as more American than the black guy.
Mar 12, 2008
Hillary's Appeal to Racism Is a Project, Not an Accident
Hillary Clinton's evolving attacks to define and brand Barack Obama involve what advertising and marketing professionals call impressions—the projection of one image (in this case Barack Obama) onto one human brain (a voter).
Designing and managing Obama’s brand by generating impressions for the benefit of Hillary running in the primary, it is necessary to merge negative (ostensibly plausible) aspects of Obama onto the consciousness of key voting demographics susceptible to certain appeals based on fear and xenophobia.
The more frequent and emotionally potent the impression, the greater is the political impact.
That’s why we see the escalation after the Feb. 19 Wisconsin primary of Hillary's project of generating political impressions of Muslim, Black, stranger, unsteady, Ken Starr, creepy, inexperience, and so on.
One threat to the project is the negative reaction of the African-American community and its allies well-versed in recognizing racist appeals, subtle or not so subtle. This threat is being realized today as we see Obama taking some 80 to 90 percent of the African-American vote in primaries and caucuses.
Hillary's amoral and empirically valid branding of her opponent is more simply stated as an old South appeal to racism.
Concomitant with branding Obama is the project of projecting Hillary as a unique and convincing brand of steady, strong, experienced, familiar, and knowledgeable.
Even among Democratic-voting communities with a negative predisposition towards Hillary, this brand of Hillary with the above positive qualities rings true, so we see Hillary present her Commander-in-Chief credentials, including vast foreign policy and national security experience.
Facts can get in the way of Hillary's project. And we do see the occasional piece knocking down Hillary's brand. See today's Clinton's foreign experience is more limited than she says, for example.
But William Douglas's thoughtful and rigorous piece in McClatchy Newspapers noted above makes less an impact than Hillary's crash kitchen sink, branding program.
After all, Hillary's is not an appeal to thoughtfulness and issue analysis; rather it is an emotional appeal to unthinking racist sentiments that can be identified in micro-demographics by Hillary's campaign devoted to the enterprise.
Some demographics can be counted on to combat Hillary’s racist, divisive project (for example):
- Today's socially tolerant under-29 vote
- Social justice progressives
- Casually political, middle-class Americans fed-up with Bush and division and concerned about fairness
Hillary is hoping these spheres remain marginalized and ineffective in Pennsylvania and the coming campaign.
Selling her soul is not a decisive factor to consider. As Hillary once said in a different context, face reality!
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