Is Hillary's campaign about to self-destruct? That's the buzz today. From calling for delegates to be reinstated in Michigan and Florida to the disguised smear of John McCain, the Clintons are playing dirty. And the cherry on top: Bill's racial remark in South Carolina.
Today in the New York Times, the boss discusses Bill Clinton's latest:
[O]n Saturday, in Columbia, pre-spinning his wife's imminent defeat, Clinton reminded reporters out of the blue that "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88. And he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama's run a good campaign here. He's run a good campaign everywhere."...
Clinton's comment alludes to one thing, and to one thing only: Jackson and Obama are both black candidates. The silent premise of Clinton's comment is that Obama's victory in South Carolina doesn't really count. Or, at least, Clinton is suggesting, it doesn't mean any more than Jackson's did…
So Bill Clinton has been playing the race card, and doing so clumsily. But why is he playing any cards? He wasn't supposed to be in the game. But just as Hillary was supposed to be finding her own voice, Bill decided to barge in, and to do so with a vengeance. This has been no favor to Hillary.
Bloggers agree that Bill is hurting Hillary--and this statement doesn't help. At the Corner, Shannen Coffin notes, "But Bill didn't mention yesterday that he took nearly 70 percent of Democratic voters in the 1992 South Carolina primary (and ran unopposed in 1996). Did Bill feel it necessary to point out Jesse Jackson's success in the Palmetto State when he was cruising to victory in 1992?"
Captain Ed says, "As long as the Clintons remain on the national stage, this kind of politicking -- the smears, the lies, and the prevarications -- will also remain."
And Andrew Sullivan remarks, "Maybe the Clintons can bring the country together again - in revulsion at their expediency."
But what's more interesting is that left-wing pundits and bloggers are increasingly agreeing with their conservative colleagues. In Saturday's LA Times, Jonathan Chait displayed his growing distaste for Clinton politics, which he referred to as "lying and sleaze-mongering":
Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.
Matthew Yglesias explains why: "It looks like Bill Clinton's heavy-handed attacks on Barack Obama didn't serve his wife well in South Carolina, with about sixty percent of voters saying Clinton's actions were a factor in their decision in what looks to have been a landslide win for Barack Obama."
Glenn Greenwald agrees: "The Clintons' strategy has become increasingly trashy, even ugly, and yesterday's remarks by Bill Clinton -- in which he pointedly compared Obama's candidacy to Jesse Jackson's and thus implicitly (though clearly) dismissed South Carolina as a state where the 'black candidate' wins, followed up by the Clinton campaign's anonymous branding of Obama as 'the black candidate' -- reeked of desperation." He links to similar opinions.
And Josh Marshall at TPM puts it simply: "I cannot deny that I've felt a mounting sense of unease verging into disgust with Bill Clinton's increasingly aggressive role in the campaign over the last couple of weeks."
Our response: "we told you so."
