HALLI CASSER-JAYNE - bio
RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
THE REAL RACIST: BARACK OBAMA?
Posted, August 1, 2008,  12:01 p.m. est

  
 

While John McCain and Barack Obama are duking it out over the issue of race here in the United States, former President Bill Clinton, America’s racist in chief according to the Obama campaign, is granting photo-ops in Africa where his foundation just awarded a five million dollar grant to Ethiopia in order to refurbish 50 healthcare clinics so that people don’t have to walk miles to get AIDS medication.  

GMA ran a package on Clinton just following a political slugfest over the issue of race in the American contest for president.

It was quite the juxtaposition.

For those who might have not been paying attention to the Democratic Primaries, let me remind you that the former President, husband of candidate Hillary Clinton, was tarred and feathered during the primaries by the Obama campaign and the press, accused ad nauseous of being a racist.

The man once named the first African-American President, the man who at the end of his presidency chose Harlem for his headquarters rather than fancy offices on New York’s Fifth Avenue, and is single-handedly responsible for Harlem’s economic boom saw his favorability ratings plummet beneath the excoriating accusations of racist leveled against him by Barack Obama and his surrogates.

The accusations beginning in New Hampshire were highly effective; Barack Obama won 85 percent of the African-American vote in the subsequent South Carolina primary, the turning point in the contest, and perhaps the moment Hillary Clinton lost her bid for her party’s nomination.

From this writers vantage point the charges seemed inconceivable if not downright silly, except that they weren’t. It was bizarre to watch the senseless charges be reiterated by the press and the left wing blogosphere and then stick.

Calling an American president a bigot is unseemly, but Barack and Company are a Rovian lot despite Obama's image as a new kind of politician. Don’t believe me? Ask Bill Clinton, or Geraldine Ferraro or any of the corpses laying in the political graveyard a result of Obama’s weapon d’attack, race.

But politics is an ugly business; surely no one knows this better than Bill Clinton. The fact that Clinton was able to beat the Republican attack machine and came out of the Monica Lewinsky scandal with high ratings was a testament to Clinton’s political genius. He seemed strangely ineffectual against the racial epithets thrown at him by the Obama camp.

Now these many months later, Bill Clinton is back on the trail bruised, his reputation permanently scarred? He’s in his beloved Africa doing for the African’s on The Dark Continent all the good he has done for the children of Africa here in America.

Accompanied on his journey by his beloved daughter, Chelsea, his wife’s campaign manager Terry McAuliff and friends Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen and a whole entourage of others, Bill Clinton will continue his good work and maybe those charges of racism used against him by Barack Obama in the long run won’t be blight on his legacy.

John McCain learned from the Clintons' experience, which if you’re a McCain backer should make you happy to know that your man is a quick learner and isn’t about to take unwarranted charges sitting down. At the first attempt by Barack Obama to play the race card against him, Mac came out swinging. He’s a man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Unlike the Clintons' who were totally unprepared for the charges leveled at them by Obama and how to effectively handle them, Mac, perhaps under the tutelage of the great and sainted teacher of campaign vitriol, Karl Rove, wasted no time in responding to the coded words of Barack Obama uttered in a campaign speech:

“What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

McCain Campaign manager, Rick Davis, immediately issued a statement and has been on the talk show circuit aggressively denying Obama’s suggestion that McCain is a racist, and making it emphatically clear that “we’re not going to allow anyone to define John McCain on those terms."

McCain aide Steve Schmidt has since stated that Obama's aim in the view of the McCain camp is "to delegitimize any line of attack against him." He said he saw that potential trap being sprung when Obama made his prediction in Missouri Wednesday.

While the press parses Obama’s statement and asks the proverbial question did he mean what he said, or is what he said what he meant, one only has to look over the history of the campaign to see Obama’s pattern. But it seems the press has forgotten how to Google. This history of the pattern of Obama's charges is all there to see with the simple touch of a keypad.

However, to really understand why there is more to this story than meets the eye, and why the issue of racism in conjunction with Barack Obama is one that needs to be explored further by the media, one only has to read Obama’s much touted autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope.”

The book has been called a tour de force, but it is more. It is a tour through the tortured mind of a youth borne of mixed parentage, raised by whites who feared, according to Obama, their own dark-skinned grandson.

Equally, it is as much the story of the people of a generation who were frightened by the color of skin as much as anything, as it is the story of a bi-racial boy coming to the realization that his skin was black but his heart was wishing he was white, and that the world was an unfair place.

The anger in the book is palpable and may be unresolved.

Americans fear this; they fear Obama’s anger and quietly some fear his need for revenge, which is why Obama despite all his good press can’t take a substantial lead in the polls in his contest against John McCain.

Is Barack Obama the real racist here?

We still don’t know.

But making statements about “they” isn’t going to win friends and influence people or allay fears…especially those borne of a generation who feared the dark color of a man’s skin as much as the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviets.