Christopher Hitchens argues that the Clinton’s have played the race card before:
I never quite understand how the Clintons’ initial exploitation of racism was overlooked the first time around and has been airbrushed from the record since. After falling behind in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, and after being caught lying about the affair with Gennifer Flowers to which he later confessed under oath, Clinton left the campaign trail and flew home to Arkansas to give the maximum publicity to his decision to sign a death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was a black inmate on death row who had shot himself in the head after committing a double murder and, instead of dying as a result, had achieved the same effect as a lobotomy would have done. He never understood the charge against him or the sentence. After being served his last meal, he left the pecan pie on the side of the tray, as he told the guards who came to take him to the execution chamber, “for later.” Several police and prison-officer witnesses expressed extreme queasiness at this execution of a gravely impaired man, and the prison chaplain, Dennis Pigman, later resigned from the prison service. The whole dismal and cruel and pathetic story was told by Marshall Frady in a long essay in The New Yorker in 1993 and is also recounted in a chapter titled “Chameleon in Black and White” by your humble servant in his book No One Left To Lie To. For now, I just ask you to imagine what would have been said if a Republican governor, falling in the polls, had gone out of his way to execute a mentally incompetent African-American prisoner.
Or leaf back, if you will, to the New York Times of March 23, 1992, and the jolly headline, “Club Where Clinton Has Golfed Retains Ways of Old South.” Yes indeedy, the Country Club of Little Rock had 500 members, all of them white, and the aspirant candidate had himself photographed there more than once until Jerry Brown made an issue of it. It was then announced by Clinton’s people that “the staff and facilities” at the club were “integrated”—a pretty way of stating that the toilets were cleaned by black Arkansans. Yet all this was forgiven by credulous liberals who were sure that they had discovered a New Democrat who was a Southerner to boot.
And now, Hitchens points out, they’re all acting shocked, shocked I tell you by Clinton’s behavior in this campaign.
That’s what happens when you spend an entire Presidential term wearing blinders.
