Straight talk about the Clintons, the Media and South Carolina

Jack and Jill Politics has an excellent post entitled “The Clintons, Black Folk and America – A Reckoning” that takes the Clintons’ bait about how great the 90s were and feeds it back to them, barbed hook and all:

All folks, not just black, start to publicly dig into the past and challenge the assumptions of Bill’s blackness and his greatness.

Here’s what they find.

• The mass incarceration of black men, due largely to a failed “War on Drugs”…
• There was the deregulation of the banking industry…
• There was the expansion of media consolidation…
• There was the missed opportunity to set us on a path of a sane energy policy…
• There was “welfare reform”…
• There was the sitting by and watching millions of people get butchered in Rwanda
• There was the set of trade deals that lowered our standards and helped gut America’s ability to provide for itself…

I’m glad the ugly has come out. I’m glad Bill Clinton’s face is glowing so brightly and so red; the better to see this campaign by. I’m glad Bill Clinton is getting down and dirty and using his considerable political capital to smear a great presidential candidate. I’m glad The Clintons are calling in favors from their black beholden elected officials and power brokers. Because every time they do, we get to dig up another little nugget which has us questioning the entire premise of “The Clinton Administration.”

And I’m glad Hillary keeps moving closer and closer to Bill, closer to that co-presidency. Keep running on “experience.” Just don’t get mad when we help remind people what that experience really was, and why many of us never want to see it return.

The whole post is worth reading, not just for black people who are on the fence about Obama, but for anyone who’s still falling for the okey-doke that Bill Clinton was a great president and that Hillary is a shoo-in in November.

ETA: TPM’s Josh Marshall, a self-professed Clinton fan, has an insightful post about his own concerns surrounding “Bill 2.0“.

I’ve had MSNBC on all morning, tracking the tone of things as South Carolinians have their say in the Democratic Primary today, and have been particularly impressed by the commentary offered by a few people:

• Chuck Todd, NBC News Political Director: Very often the voice of reason in the various MSNBC roundtable discussions, his even tone, ability to look at multiple sides of a situation, and intelligent questions are a welcome contrast to the usual high-volume nonsense of most political coverage.
• Mika Brzezinski, Morning Joe co-host: Joe Scarborough has grown on me over the past year, especially recently as he’s unabashedly praised Obama’s message of post-partisanship, but it’s Brzezinski who I really enjoy. Like Todd, she offers intelligent commentary and attempts to dig beneath the surface of the issue of the day.
• Bakari T. Sellers, South Carolina State Representative: He was on Morning Joe today as an Obama surrogate and impressed me greatly with his maturity, political savvy and intelligence. He’s only 23 years old but represented himself and the Obama campaign extremely well. I suspect we’ll be seeing his name nationally 10 years from now, if not sooner.

The whole “race” angle that’s really come to the fore now that the Democratic primary has moved down to South Carolina could turn out to be a good thing for Obama if he wins by a solid margin and Edwards manages to pull off second place on the strength of white voters who moved his way instead of towards Clinton. His victory in Iowa and strong performances in New Hampshire and Nevada — where he was the preferred candidate in rural, traditionally conservative areas which is why he pulled the majority of delegates — proves he can appeal to white voters and will serve as an important contrast to the results of the more overtly polarized south. There’s also the relatively unreferenced reality of Clinton losing what was always assumed to be a shoo-in constituency for her, as up until this month, she was way ahead of Obama amongst African-American voters in every single poll out there, including a double-digit lead in South Carolina prior to Iowa.

The question really shouldn’t be “Can Obama win the ‘white’ vote?” but rather, “Can Clinton can win without the ‘black’ vote?”

If Edwards can leapfrog Clinton tonight or come within a couple of percentage points, it should send a message that their slick games of the past week have finally backfired, making Feb. 5th a three-way race again which would slightly favor Obama as I fully believe Edwards pulls more voters away from Clinton than he does Obama. In that scenario, it’ll be interesting to see what Bill Clinton does and whether the media will finally start digging underneath Hillary’s nonsensical “35 years of experience” by actually specifying the results of that “experience” as Jack and Jill noted above.

Written by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Content Officer for LibraryPass, and former publisher & marketing director for Writer’s Digest. Previously, he was also project lead for the Panorama Project; director, content strategy & audience development for Library Journal & School Library Journal; and founding director of programming & business development for the original Digital Book World.