Race-card flap reopens Clinton camp wounds

from The Politico
By: Ben Smith
August 5, 2008

The Clintons and their allies may forgive Barack Obama for beating Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, but there’s one sore point they’re not quite ready to absolve: Leaving the impression that Bill and Hillary Clinton have a race problem.

“I am not a racist,” Clinton said Monday in a testy interview with ABC News in Monrovia, Liberia, in response to a question that wasn’t quite related to that subject. "I've never made a racist comment and I never attacked [Obama] personally."

Obama himself never suggested that the Clintons had harbored racial animus, though his campaign did at least once make that case to the media, and some of his supporters overtly denounced the former president. Former Clinton aides acknowledge that Bill Clinton, particularly in comparing Obama’s South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson’s victory, all but invited the charge from Obama’s allies.

But regardless of the real meaning of Clinton’s words, and of Clinton’s long relationship with African-Americans, this is the rift between the Clinton and Obama camps that still cuts the deepest, and the one that may have the severest consequences for Obama’s White House bid. When John McCain’s campaign manager last week accused Obama of playing the “race card,” the Clintons or their supporters could have provided a powerful rebuttal. Instead they were silent, and in private, some even quietly cheered.

(Continued here.)