Clinton doesn't get it. The game is changing and he can't keep up.

Make sure you watch the video before commenting.

The text beneath really doesn't come within a country mile of giving the exchange its full due.

Once again Obama shows a great willingness to run a campaign not about race or gender.

Once again the MSM leaps on every possible attempt to portray the Clintons as engaging in race-baiting

Once again Bill Clinton proves that he can't just shut his mouth even when it might be hurting his wife

Once again I'm sure the comments on this thread by Obama supporters will be much less classy and much more crude than those of Obama himself. His supporters are obsessed with race, and hypersensitive to even the slightest slights that could possibly give them any cause for outrage. I hope I'm wrong, but the Obama supporters on TPM have proven themselves to be a pretty biased bunch

"Well, I won't say Bill Clinton's racist--I'll just say that he's old."

Bill Clinton is old.
He is as washed out as a ghost.
That's a given.

So what is your point?

Thw white vote will swing the pendelum on Feb. 5 and not in Obama's favor.

The media is oevrhyping Obama again and demonozing the Clintons and people are realizing it.

Score Clinton.

They are stealing the election from the American people

I see. When Bill Clinton is quoted out of context, the election is being stolen from the American people. But when the Clintons quote Obama out of context, that's just tough campaigning that shows the Clintons are winners, and that candidates need to "watch what they say."

Once again I'm sure the comments on this thread by Obama supporters will be much less classy and much more crude than those of Obama himself. His supporters are obsessed with race, and hypersensitive to even the slightest slights that could possibly give them any cause for outrage. I hope I'm wrong, but the Obama supporters on TPM have proven themselves to be a pretty biased bunch

Once again:

Maybe you ought some commentary outside your I-am-so-objective-and-you-are-so-biased elitist liberal slant of your knee-jerk nose:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=login

DemUnity08:

Once again I'm sure the comments on this thread by Obama supporters will be much less classy and much more crude than those of Obama himself.

Two cases in point:

wwjb - accuses Clintons of race baiting.

Gregor - lies about Clinton admitting to race baiting

Keep the lies and bias coming, Obama supporters. You're only hurting your own candidate by showing you have no interest in promoting his own vision of a politics of unity and building bridges. No, you're much happier with your anger. What is it about Obama that attracts such dishonest supporters?

Obama is a class act. The Clintons are not. They have worked mightily, and will continue, to try to draw Obama into the mud, where they are world champions. He slips on occasion but pulls himself above it. Good for Obama. Good for the nation.

I believe this is a superb answer.

Since seeing the Jesse Jackson remarks yesterday I've been asking myself whether Bill Clinton has all along been a closet racist or whether he just thinks it's okay to destroy everything as long as he stays on top.

Obama answered my question: Bill Clinton is simply out-of-date. Sad, but true.

DTM,

You are absolutely right.

Greg,

If you listen to Obama's victory speech, and with that "lense" view Obama's remarks you see that he was referring to the "old style" politics that Bill has been mired in.

It's actually quite brilliant. He's marginalizing Bill Clinton without being insulting. If anyone doubted Obama's political finesse, this should put you at ease.

lens not lense.

Gregor said "stop the Clintons and make them pay a penalty for the kind of dirty, race-baiting, surrogate-seige campaign they've been running."

It's very true, any Democrat with even an ounce of integrity is fed up with the narcissistic Clintons and wants them gone. They are damaging the Demcoratic Party, the democratic process and the nation.

Where can I find the first part of this clip...you know the part the media so lovingly cut off?

Like Laura and others have said, Obama was deftly saying that Bill was using an outdated perspective. "He's not an evil (racist) guy, just a little out of touch."

I think it's a good response. It doesn't 'let Bill off the hook,' exceot in an abstract, moral sense, and ties him right back to discredited politics. Thus diminishing the heretofore "BIG" dog.

DemUnity08,

You make a good point, and clearly some Obamaniacs get a little carried away.

Willie Brown in today's SF Chronical (article entitled: Obama Wins Big in S. Carolina)is quoted as advising:

"Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who was the presidential campaign manager for the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1988, agreed.

'I would urge the Obama campaign to silence its surrogates and supporters who say that President Clinton injected race into the campaign because that keeps the story going. And it doesn't help (Obama) at all,'said Brown.

Obama, he said, should not have responded directly to Bill Clinton. 'He's not the candidate. I would have completely ignored him,' Brown said."

Alot of Monday night quarterbacking, but Obama's toning down of the racial impetus of Bill Clinton's remarks may have this council as an underlying factor as well. Obama needs to stop talking race and start talking transformation, which is a lesson he seems to be taking to heart.

You can't find it. I saw it YESTERDAY when it first aired. Now, the clip has been edited to try to paint Bill a biggot.

If Dems are trying to "dump" the Clintons by using these tactics (or endorsing them), we are not the part of "hope" that Obama promises. Anyone with 1/2 a brain can see that the response from Bill doesn't fit the later part of the question. And, why would he say he was being "baited" if the question was only the later part? I'm not willing to surrender the principle of fair play to jump on the Obama bandwagon. The Clintons deserve a fair election - as do all the candidates.

CalD,

You know, I was looking at the demographic breakouts earlier and started to get confused at the way we are expressing some of these percentages. I keep having to remind myself to look at percentages as part of the SAMPLE BEING REPRESENTED.

For instance, I heard that Obama got 24% and Clinton 36% OF THE TOTAL WHITE VOTE.

But then you point out that white voters made up 23% OF THE TOTAL OF OBAMA'S VOTES.

So--on to my question: (I'm not great at math, so please excuse me if this is a dumb question)

Do black voters make up the majority OF ALL DEMOCRATIC VOTERS IN S.C.? And if so, how might this skew the way we're looking at these percentages?

This question is open to anyone willing to explain to a math dumb-ass.

D. Campbell and Tee,

Wonder if the full clip can be found on You Tube? I'd be interested in seeing it too, if somebody finds it. That certainly WOULD change the meaning everyone is taking from this.

Hmmm.. A mysterious clip that was seen once and now cannot be found anywhere that is being used to paint Bill Clinton as a biggot [sic].

Has all the earmarks of the VRWC.

ChrisNBama:

The Clinton's are playing a very dangerous game: Divide and conquer.

Here's where your bias is showing, ChrisNBama. Try this instead:

In elections, especially in places where there are lots of minority voters, race is always a factor (although none like to talk about it). Therefore, the Clintons are taking advantage of this feature of politics, and they may be stoking the flames by repeatedly making comments -- intentionally or not -- that remind voters that Obama is black or Hillary is a woman.

I think that's fair. But only a biased person can say the Clintons have been intentionally divisive.

Sadly, these days nobody feels it's necessary to be fair to the Clintons or give them the benefit of the day. People routinely talk about them as if they know their secret motivations and dark, dark hearts lurking behind every remark. Sigh.

Laura,

Yes, according to the exit polls, I believe something like 55% of the voters in the South Carolina primary were black.

By the way, Obama won handily among non-black voters under 30. Edwards won among non-black voters 30-59, and tied with Clinton among black voters 60+.

In fact, if you were trying to specify whose voters were the most uniform in a racial sense, it would obviously be Edwards, not Obama, since Edwards got something like 3% of the black vote. And yet for some reason some people want to cast the results as black people voting based on race when they voted for Obama, as opposed to white people voting based on race when they voted for Edwards.

DemUnity,

I'm an Obama partisan. I've never sought to conceal that fact. So, yes, I have a bias.

Likewise, you're biased for Hillary. Nothing wrong with that.

The fact is, nothing is "objective" anyway. We all perceive reality through our respective worldview's, opinions, filters, whatever.

However, I will disagree with you. The Clinton's have been following a strategy of divide and conquer. Now, you may object to my use of the word "divisive" as bearing a negative connotation, rightly so, but the facts speak for themselves regarding their strategy.

Plum:

You are correct. The interesting part is that when Bill distorts Obama, then Obama can merely reply that that's another example of the "Old Politics". Sort of like the Gipper when he said, "There you go again".

Hi Laura,

I couldn't tell you what the exact party ID numbers for SC are specifically. Nationally it tends to be about a fairly even 3-way split between Democrats, Republicans and independents. Republicans are down a little nationally this year but SC is also a pretty red state. So figure Democrats and Republicans for 1/3 each.

Something that makes SC a little unusual is that it has a little more than double the national percentage of African Americans. Nationally, they're about 13% of the population but in SC, it's more like 29%. In general, African Americans tend to vote heavily Democratic -- by a 3 or 4 to one ratio. So just extrapolating from national trends and census data for SC, if 29% of South Carolinians are black and 75% of black voters are Democrats, that should work out to about 22% of all SC voters if all other things were equal.

So if 33% of all SC voters were Democrats, that's potentially a very large proportion of African Americans, perhaps as much as two thirds. Of course there are other factors to consider but it does make the 55%/45%, Black/other turnout in yesterday's primary unsurprising. Nationally, black voters tend to account for maybe 15-20% of the Democratic vote.

Kjoe wrote on January 27, 2008 6:44 PM:

"Clinton is so often hailed as this great political strategist, who knows what to do to win."

I think this might be the talking point that died in South Carolina, or at the least, will never be said so matter-of-factly again.
If you take everything starting at the S.C. debates onward to this morning, it's an almost inescapable conclusion that Obama took a race that could have been close, and played his hand brilliantly to change the race dramatically.
At least brilliantly compared to the Clintons.
Everything from rezko to reagan to race he was able to paint as an unfair and ill-motivated attack on him by a powerful establishment, with Democratic referees on all sides agreeing. Then in the final days when The Clinton's give up attacking (for a time) try to go positive in a new direction, and run on the record of Bill's administration, Obama is successfully able to reframe the debate about the past versus the future (in a contest for liberal voters). And when Bill attempts to paint him as the "black candidate", he does it in a way that leaves Obama an opening to reinforce his message of Clintons = Past, and simultaneously remind people why the past is not what we want to go back to.

I think we just might hear a few voices in the following days talk about what complete circles Obama has run around the Clinton "tactical brilliance" we have heard so much about.

DTM,

Thanks. Interesting notes about Edwards!

DemUnity08,

You make some very good points in your 6:42 pm post. The truth is, this is such a unique situation, and coming from such a long history of racism which most of us would like to put behind us, we (as a society) are vulnerable to both racial insensitivity and hyper-sensitivity. So a lot of this probably just goes with the territory of this moment in time.

However, speaking to your defense of the Clintons, I offer my own feelings (I don't claim to speak for a lot of folks--I recognize that I can speak only for myself)

I've always known that Bill Clinton is the consummate politician--he LOVES campaigning and all of the strategizing that goes with it. I wasn't surprised when he and Hillary made the decision to play hardball.

I was somewhat willing to allow that the remarks in NH were quite clumsy, and that it was possible there was no malicious intent to them.

The flap over the Reagan remarks was standard campaign fare, and both sides (whether their supporters want to admit it or not) were trying to do a little point-scoring with it. Hokey, yes. I rolled my eyes and accepted it for what it was.

But this latest thing...the appearance of trying to marginalize Obama's victory in SC by either injecting or just by REINFORCING the idea of Obama as a race candidate...this one hurts.

So, the powerful, prestigious, former President and de facto head of the Democratic Party--a WHITE guy--doesn't really mean anything racist when he points out that the SC win may cast Obama into the role of "the Black candidate." Maybe so. I may even go along with the idea that he's not racist, just out-of-date.

But when you're looking at an impressive, top-class candidate with a viable national candidacy, who happens to be Black, being described in such a disadvantageous way by a white guy who has an interest in holding him back, it sure FEELS racist.

It is part blessing and part burden to Bill Clinton that he is a popular former President, because his words, in particular, carrying as much power as they do, have the capacity to hurt a lot of feelings.

Here's the direct quote from "the racist:" "Jesse Jackson won in South Carolina twice in South Carolina, in '84 & '88. And he ran a good campaign and Senator Obama's run a good campaign here-he's run a good campaign everywhere."

Stephanopoulis says "he implication is pretty clear: You’re the Jesse Jackson of 2008." Excuse me? WTF?

As opposed to the ACTUAL statement: Senator Obama's run a good campaign here-he's run a good campaign everywhere." The historical import being- he's gone beyond Jesse Jackson.

I think Obama's recently been able to nail Hillary Clinton when he's had to and answer pointed questions with accuracy. Clinton has a frame of reference. It's called shaping the story. It's called, "please overlook the fact my candidate lost across the spectrum."

Obama quite rightly, without having to get into argument focuses on the momentum he's generated and underlines "that was then, this is today." It strengthens his platform, focuses on what he sees as his core strengths and continues to reinforce the fact he garnered broadbased support.

At the very end, you can hear Stephanopoulis start whinging again about race. As do many of Obama's supporters. This is counterproductive. It's why Obama media people asked that this whole race issue not be made paramount. Obama DOESN'T NEED IT. He needs, RATHER, to continue expanding his white base of support.

The strong dislike I've taken to the Clintons has little to do with how they are campaigning and everything to do with how they were Bush enablers for 7 years.

We shouldn't reward failure in the Democratic party.