Hillary Pulls Race Card and Obama May Fold: Margaret Carlson

By Margaret Carlson

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- At approximately 6 p.m. on Jan. 15, three hours before a Kumbaya interlude at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, I saw Al Sharpton defending Senator Barack Obama from charges of youthful drug abuse.

As we all know by now, the accusation arises from Obama's own admission in his modern Horatio Alger tale, ``Dreams From My Father,'' published long before he became a presidential candidate, that he tried cocaine as a teenager.

The hoopla over this has validated the judgment of George W. Bush eight years ago to refuse to answer questions about his own alleged drug use, which many believe continued well beyond his teen years. This is why honesty isn't considered the best policy by political consultants. But I digress.

Sharpton has done things to redeem himself in recent years, but his presence is a one-way ticket back to Tawana Brawley, boycotts, shakedowns and good old-fashioned, in-your-face confrontational race-based politics. Seeing him in that box on TV, I realized that the Clintons had done what they needed to do to stop Obama's historic surge in its tracks.

From the start of his career, Obama wanted, and needed, to remove the race card from the political deck. While it isn't clear from whose sleeve the card was pulled, it is likely it wasn't from the person with the most to lose.

If Hillary Clinton's campaign had taken only one shot at Obama, it might have been blown off as a mistake. But four shots constitutes a pattern, with Clinton's former New Hampshire chairman, Bill Shaheen, Representative Charles Rangel, Clinton pollster Mark Penn and Black Entertainment Television founder Bob Johnson all getting into the act.

Going Too Far

Surrogates don't take printed instructions, but neither do they want to upset the candidate they've traveled to the hinterlands to please. And Penn isn't even a surrogate. He's the campaign's top strategist.

In the middle of the drug pile-on, Clinton, desperate after her Iowa defeat, went too far when trying to imprint the message that Obama is all talk and no action. She infelicitously compared Martin Luther King Jr. to former President Lyndon Johnson.

``Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,'' she said.

In fairness to the Clintons, even masters of the game trip up when the crown believed to be theirs slips out of reach. They had just hours to convince folks in New Hampshire that the guy who Iowans had fallen in love with was wrong for them.

Red-Faced Rant

Bill Clinton, in particular, was furious at Hillary's loss, indulging in the kind of red-faced rants vividly described in George Stephanopoulos's tale of White House life, ``All Too Human.''

How dare this upstart backbencher steal this election from Hillary! The press? What a lazy bunch of enablers swallowing this &%*# fairy tale, all this hooey about what we share being so much greater than our differences.

Any thought that Bill would be less active in New Hampshire was shelved. In 1992 Hillary helped Bill become the Comeback Kid in the Granite State after a lounge singer gave a press conference about an affair. Now it was his chance to return the favor.

But they were a bit off in choosing to mention an African- American idealist (King as Obama) in juxtaposition with a tough pragmatist who can get things done (LBJ as herself). The two campaigns fanned the flames and cable TV poured on the kerosene, booking the usual suspects to chew it all over. By Monday morning, the Democrats were in danger of becoming as divided as Republicans.

Convenient Cease-fire

A cease-fire initiated by Obama was formalized into a peace agreement during a love fest at the debate. And why not? For Clinton's campaign, it was Mission Accomplished, intentional or not. Obama was now the black candidate. There had been minimal blowback and only a minor casualty (Shaheen resigned).

For Obama, he lost the essence of his candidacy as the first black man to run as himself. Once the race card is on the table, no matter who puts it there, it's impossible to put it back up anyone's sleeve. Obama may look back on the first two weeks of 2008 as the time when he lost the nomination to Clinton.

At the height of the controversy on Sunday, Clinton repeated her paean to King from her book ``Living History.'' She'd been taken to hear ``this phenomenon known as Dr. King'' by her youth minister and remembered his plea to awaken to ``the great revolution that the civil rights pioneers were waging.''

No one's doubting Clinton's belief in equality, but however much she was moved, Hillary became a Goldwater Girl. And Senator Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Her journey to embrace civil rights is proof that anyone can grow up. But maybe not to be president.

(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: January 17, 2008 00:18 EST

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