It certainly seems so.
Just consider this from the Politico:
A series of comments from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, her husband, and her supporters are spurring a racial backlash and adding a divisive edge to the presidential primary as the candidates head south to heavily African-American South Carolina.
The comments, which ranged from the New York senator appearing to diminish the role of Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement — an aide later said she misspoke — to Bill Clinton dismissing Sen. Barack Obama’s image in the media as a “fairy tale” — generated outrage on black radio, black blogs and cable television. And now they’ve drawn the attention of prominent African-American politicians.
“A cross-section of voters are alarmed at the tenor of some of these statements,” said Obama spokeswoman Candice Tolliver, who said that Clinton would have to decide whether she owed anyone an apology.
And it’s not just Bill and Hillary who’ve been saying some strange things about Obama and race recently. Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York and Clinton-backer said this:
Speaking Tuesday to the New York Post’s Fred Dicker, whose show airs on Albany’s Talk 1300 radio station, Cuomo said of the early primaries: “It’s not a TV-crazed race. Frankly, you can’t buy your way through.”
He added later, “You have to sit down with 10 people in a living room. You can’t shuck and jive at a news conference; you can’t just put off reporters, because you have real people looking at you, saying ‘answer the question.’”
The 1994 book “Juba to Jive, a Dictionary of African-American Slang,” says “shuck and jive” dates back to the 1870s and was an “originally southern ‘Negro’ expression for clowning, lying, pretense.”
The Guardian quotes one Clinton advisor as saying this:
In the words of that Clinton adviser: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”
And one Democratic operatives thinks Obama won’t play well among Latinos:
Hillary loyalists maintain faith in her iron support in New York and also California–whose vast numbers of Latino voters are thought to be skeptical of an African-American candidate. (One Democratic operative recently described this to me as the Do the Right Thing factor.)
So what is this ? I don’t know for sure, but I do know this — if Republicans were saying things like this publicly, they be condemned as racist.
January 11th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
It shows how much the Democrats take the black vote for granted, and unfortunately get away with it!
January 12th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
They’re not gonna “get away with” it this time. Blacks are up in arms like I haven’t seen in 40 years. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like the mass outpouring of rage and loathing that the Clintons’ comments has been eliciting. There is already suspicion about NH, and South Carolina uses those idiot touch-screen voting machines that don’t have an auditable paper trail, so there’s even more suspicion about vote-rigging and electoral fraud. With the Clintons’ racist comments– a big string of them, made many times here– this is the s**t hitting the fan.
It’s by far the most combustible mixture I’ve ever seen in a Presidential primary contest. If Hillary is nominated, especially with the perception of fraud and the racism rearing its ugly head like this, the country is probably gonna explode. Riots dwarfing even those of 1968. This is the peril that the Clintons have brought us. I used to support the Clintons, but no more.