Check out Paul Krugman’s blog entry and column from today.
Now lest you think he is defending Hillary Clinton, bear in mind that his criticisms have focused exclusively on policy and on the actions of the candidates on the campaign trail — he has not made personal attacks. The blog entry deals with false accusations of race-baiting by the Clintons. And it is tied in with today’s column, which has to do with a new book by Rick Perlstein called Nixonland.
From the blog entry:
I’m starting to get emails from angry people who tell me that I’m ignoring all the terrible race-baiting the Clintons have done. I think I’ll just outsource my response to Clive Crook — who is, by the way, an Obama supporter.
Some commentators accused Bill of playing the race card when he called Obama’s account of his position on the Iraq war a “fairy tale”. How so? What did that have to do with race? And does Hillary’s comment about King, the only instance Morris bothers to offer, even qualify? She merely said that getting the job done required a can-do president as well as an inspiring and visionary champion. And so it did. I cannot see that this subtracts anything from King’s stature, or that it was intended to. Whatever its merits, this is the Clintons’ old theme, not a sinister new one: if elected, she would hit the ground running, whereas the inexperienced Obama would be out of his depth. It took a hyper-sensitive press to turn that comment into a racial slur.
I think the press played the race card, not the Clintons.
And he’s right. Make no mistake, the Clintons are playing dirty politics — the same kind they’ve always played, the kind that has divided the Democratic Party and brought it to its currently weakened and fractious state. Because in the end, it’s never about country or party, it’s all about the Clintons. But they’re not playing the race card; Obama is. If you think he is any different than the Clintons, and that he isn’t the one exploiting race in this campaign, think again. Obama’s own actions on the campaign trail — and those of his followers — have been equally as divisive and based on the man himself instead of what’s good for the country or the Democratic Party. As Krugman writes in his column:
I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.
What’s particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” — the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.
The prime example of Clinton rules in the 1990s was the way the press covered Whitewater. A small, failed land deal became the basis of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investigation, which never found any evidence of wrongdoing on the Clintons’ part, yet the “scandal” became a symbol of the Clinton administration’s alleged corruption.
During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.
And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.
I call it Clinton rules, but it’s a pattern that goes well beyond the Clintons. For example, Al Gore was subjected to Clinton rules during the 2000 campaign: anything he said, and some things he didn’t say (no, he never claimed to have invented the Internet), was held up as proof of his alleged character flaws.
Sorry for the long quote, but it was necessary. Not everyone is able to read NYT content online. Krugman also warns that if Obama is the nominee, he shall most certainly be subjected to the same rules of mistreatment set down by Republicans and the corporate-owned media. As he points out, “progressives should realize that Nixonland is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.”
That’s a lesson we all should have learned by now.
