Howard Fineman of Newsweek Magazine has done what I would have thought impossible, even for someone who divides his time pontificating on talk television and writing for a slick mainstream publication: he was written an article pontificating about race in the current campaign, and assigning blame here and there for the role it has come to play, without once mentioning Rev. Wright.
Wright’s absence makes Fineman’s complaint against the Clintons seem not only petty but downright pettifogging. “Bill Clinton,” he writes, “should never have dismissed Obama’s victory in South Carolina as a race-based one, just like Jesse Jackson’s” — even though Fineman recognizes that Clinton was accurate! — and, furthermore, they should not point out that Obama has a real problem attracting blue-collar white votes. As he put it:
(Even though it was in good measure just that the Clintons should have had the wisdom not to say so. Neither should their main argument to superdelegates be that Obama can’t get enough white voters to win in the fall. First, that may not be true—especially if Hillary gets out there to help him. And, while it might seem unfair, the Clintons need to have a better reason. They sound too much like they are fanning the prejudice they claim to deplore and that, indeed, they worked throughout their lives to oppose.[The absence of the close parenthesis and some other punctuation is in the original.]
Politicians are usually criticized for not telling the truth, but race has gotten the Dems and their liberal fellow travelers in the press so bollixed up that now they’re criticizing their own when they tell the truth….
Great post. If not else, this election season has put on full display the true nature of identity politics and the intellectual dishonesty of those wedded to it. Linked. http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2008/05/interesting-posts-from-around-web-18.html