Letters to the Editor
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Ahhh, it's the Media's Fault!...the Media!?!?
Don't blame this on the media: the Clintons' abiding feature is the will and ambition to win. They'll bring out the brass knuckles if they have to.
In that light, let's examine what I believe really happened. Hillary was stunned by the Iowa results and the campaign realized they had to bloody Obama, particularly in regard to one salient point: his electability in an American general election. In short, how could it highlight the question, without actually coming out and saying so, of whether a black man--no matter how charismatic--with an ethnic first and surname and when faced with an historically ruthless opponent even after eight disastrous years of Republican conservative rule, could win the highest office in a still overwhelmingly majority white nation, in the Fall? Hence the subtle digs regarding long admitted youthful drug use, the remarks about flashiness, "shucking and jiving," the seemingly heedless Martin Luther King/Lyndon Johnson comparision and the condescension surrounding the hoseannas toward his speechifying--all designed to make sure the enthusiastically pro-Obama Democratic primary and caucus electorate was aware that it wasn't Jesus Christ it was pinning its hopes on, in November.
The Clintons are not racist but that doesn't mean they won't attempt to artfully use whatever is at hand to bring down an opponent or dismantle an obstace to power [the obscure Sister Souljah put down to mitigate Jesse Jackon's remaining influence on the party, in '92; Bill Clinton managing to get himself photographed for the front page of the New York Times and the wires at the head of a massive column of black convicts in striped prison wear at a time when Democrats were being portrayed by conservatives and others as a less than law and order party of minorities]. Again, the Clintons are ruthlessly ambitious and when their backs are up against the wall it shouldn't be hard to imagine they'll come out of the clinch snarling and clawing.
That's what happened after Iowa and the Obama campaign perceived it to be working--which is why they understandably overreacted and stumbled a bit. The challenge for Obama is to somehow blunt the "silent dog whistles," as Chris Matthews memorably put it, last night, of a surreptitious Clinton attack while not appearing to be willingly pulled into the mire of Politics as Usual. The Clinton campaign knows it has served up this dilemma to the Obama people and I'm willing to believe they'll justify this with the rationale that it isn't anything the Republicans won't try in November, so the sooner, the better.