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'Racist' charges debunked

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http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=aa0cd21b-0ff2-4329-88a1-69c6c268b304
Race Man by Sean Wilentz
How Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton.
Post Date Wednesday, February 27, 2008

From The Australian News -- "Stop Bagging Hillary"
Here is a cool-headed look from Australia at a ridiculous charge of 'racism' the Obama camp has been making.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23140008-7583,00.html

[Obama launched] a successful campaign to persuade the American media that the Clintons were engaged in a campaign of lies about him and, even worse, in a campaign of surreptitious racism.
[....]
Everyone - Democrat and Republican - [had] jumped on the change bandwagon. Clinton pointed out, however, that it's not enough to hope and demand change; you had to be able to define what change you want and had to be able to deliver it.

Obama riposted that this failed to take account of the sort of impetus for change created by great rhetoric of the kind used by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. So far, so good. Normal political exchange.

Note it was Obama who introduced King into the debate, on his side. Clinton then made the obvious, and surely entirely legitimate, factual point that King's rhetoric had certainly been the indispensable inspiration for change, but that president Lyndon Johnson's efforts had also been indispensable in actually getting civil rights legislation through the Congress against deep opposition from parts of his own party.

The place went into meltdown. This was said to disrespect King. How could Clinton equate King to Johnson? She wasn't: she was simply pointing out that both were necessary, one to inspire and one to deliver.

Soon her words were being construed not just as disrespect but as hidden racism. Make no mistake: Obama's people joined in briefing the media and others extensively to create this impression.

The Clintons' record on race in general, and King in particular, has over decades of their public life proved unimpeachable.

They have both been champions of the black cause. Yet from that moment on, the Clintons have been assailed (with obvious glee and encouragement from Republican commentators) for allegedly mounting a subliminal race campaign.

It's a tragedy for Obama that this has happened. The consequence has been exactly what you would expect. In the Nevada caucus, blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama and non-blacks voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. In South Carolina, the black vote was 53 per cent of the total. Obama secured 80 per cent of it. That's the reason for his overwhelming victory there. He won only 23 per cent of the non-black vote. Contrast this to Iowa, where he won a large proportion of the white vote.

Yes, this is a tragedy, but it's entirely his own fault for allowing his manifest shock and petulance at his defeat in New Hampshire to stop him doing the obvious thing. He should have vigorously defended the Clintons from the first moment on the racism charge. By letting it run, by allowing his operatives to encourage it, by appearing aggrieved, the very thing he has worked so hard to avoid has happened: he became "the black candidate."

What Hillary really said:

"Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.”

Jesse Jackson SENIOR supported Hillary' statement:

When Hillary said Lyndon Johnson was necessary to get the Voting Rights Act passed, of course she's right…. King appreciated what Johnson helped achieve, even as he continued to challenge him.

John Lewis supported her:

“It is unfortunate that people have tried to distort what Mrs. Clinton had to say about Dr. King.”
“I think there has been a deliberate and systematic attempt by some people in the Obama campaign to really fan the flames about race and to really distort what Senator Clinton said. I understood and I think most right thinking people understood what she said.
“President and Senator Clinton have a record, a history, a very long history of bringing people together. No right thinking American would ever think that Senator or President Clinton would ever do anything that would use the race card”
“I must tell you…I’m trying to set the record straight…the Obama camp is doing something else, theyr’e sending out memos to the media trying to suggest that the Clintons are playing the race card.”
----------------Rep. John Lewis on News Hour 1/14. Lewis is a Black hero from the MLK era

Charlie Rangel supported her, called Obama's claim 'stupid'

"How race got into this thing is because Obama said ‘race.' But there is nothing that Hillary Clinton has said that baffles me. I would challenge anybody to belittle the contribution that Dr. King has made to the world, to our country, to civil rights, and the Voting Rights Act. But for him to suggest that Dr. King could have signed that act is absolutely stupid. It's absolutely dumb to infer that Doctor King, alone, passed the legislation and signed it into law."
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2008/01/rangel-obamas-mlk-attack-absou.html