I know that diehard Clinton supporters probably won’t believe this guy, but he was a committed Clinton super-delegate and so when he says this, disgruntled or not, I tend to believe him:
Rep. Rob Andrews, who supported Hillary Clinton throughout the primary season, disclosed he received a phone call shortly before the April 22 Pennsylvania primary from a top member of Clinton’s organization and that the caller explicitly discussed a strategy of winning Jewish voters by exploiting tensions between Jews and African-Americans.
“There have been signals coming out of the Clinton campaign that have racial overtones that indeed disturb me,” Andrews said at his campaign headquarters in Cherry Hill Tuesday night after he lost his bid for the U.S. Senate nomination. “Frankly, I had a private conversation with a high-ranking person in the campaign … that used a racial line of argument that I found very disconcerting. It was extremely disconcerting given the rank of this person. It was very disturbing.”
Andrews said the phone call came after he angered the Clinton camp by making some positive comments about Obama. He would not disclose the caller’s name because of the private nature of the conversation.
Obviously he’s coming out now because his support for Clinton didn’t help him win the primary and so he no longer has any reason to fear payback. And just as obviously it would have been a much more courageous move to disclose this call back when it happened in April, rather than now in June, when the race is over and it serves little point. Still, it demonstrates that Obama supporters were not delusional about all the racial crap coming from the Clinton camp. This is simply more proof that the tale being told among Clinton supporters that Obama was the one who played the “race card” was as false as every other spurious charge they have slung at him and Michelle.
People, Hillary Clinton would not have served this country well if she had been elected President. This is the type of politics you expect from the Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves and Richard Nixons of the world. To pit Jewish Americans and African Americans, two critical and essential partners in the modern liberal coalition, and former allies in the fight for civil rights, against each other for personal political gain is about as toxic a political stratagem as any person, much less from the one time leading Democratic contender for the Presidency and still extremely popular former First Lady, could employ.
To steal a phrase from Scott McClellan, her Presidency would have been more of the “permanent campaign” that marked and marred the Bush years, and which have led our country down the path to ruination, economically, politically, morally and in every other way imaginable. Nor should she be offered the position of Vice President under Obama. Regardless of her superior intelligence, ability to engage in political in-fighting ability, capacity for hard work and sheer, raw determination, she should never be given the opportunity to sit in the Oval Office as the head of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Let her find another means to serve her ambition and her country.
I don’t know if her core personality was always like this, or if the long years of vicious attacks by the right wing during the past 30 years and marriage to a flawed, philandering husband reforged her character into the cynical, hardened and narcissistic person she has become. I suppose it doesn’t really matter now. I don’t even feel outrage anymore. It’s simply just a sad, sorry end to what could have been.
