Andrew Sullivan fears that, whatever the outcome of tonight’s primaries, the press will frame it as about race.
[W]hat Obama has been subjected to is a classic pincer movement: the Clintons have attacked from the right, subtly and not-so-subtly framing Obama’s candidacy as a racial one, and evoking Bill’s own Bubba identity and Hillary’s totally fabricated working class white credentials. And Jeremiah Wright has attacked from the left: desperate for attention, alternately demonizing Obama for selling out and projecting his own clownish-left sensibility onto the first serious black contender for the presidency. Wright has given white voters permission – and an alibi – not to vote for Obama on racial grounds. The Clintons have given the same voters a Fox News-approved, Rove-blessed alternative to racial transcendence.
There’s not much doubt that the Clintons have deliberately injected race into the equation. Why, though, is such as attack considered as coming “from the right”? The Clintons aren’t conservatives. And, certainly, conservatives have no monopoly on racial demagoguery.
The Clintons are simply exploiting a perceived weakness of an opponent in a baldy shameless manner. That’s the sine qua non of Clintonism, frankly, and is explicitly apathetic to ideology. That was the essence of the triangulation campaign that Bill Clinton and Dick Morris cooked up, after all, well before anyone outside of Texas had ever heard the name Karl Rove.
