Josh Marshall: Taking a Deep Breath

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Taking a Deep Breath

It is remarkable, or perhaps it's not so remarkable, how rapidly this punching match over race has escalated between the Clinton and Obama camps. Even calling it that is perhaps controversial in itself.

I'm discussing this with you because it's quickly become a complicated editorial issue for us to deal with.

It's genuinely unclear to me how much one side or the other is consciously pushing this, how much it's escalated based in part on misunderstandings, or whether, in a somewhat related fashion, hyping journalistic accounts has given the engagement a life of its own.

Some of the statements recently attributed to the Clintons have seemed at best awkward in how they're discussing race and the civil rights movement, others have struck me as unobjectionable statements interpreted in a tendentious fashion.

You can see in our news section we've picked up the story just out from The Guardian which quotes some unidentified "Clinton advisor" saying: "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."

Now, as I said, I have a bit of a hard time knowing what's going on here. If this is really the word the Clinton campaign wants its surrogates putting out, they're really much stupider than I could have imagined. On the other hand, 'advisor' is a notoriously slippery phrase that can mean almost anything. Campaigns have hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who in one fashion or another 'advise' them. A lot of those people aren't under any kind of real control. And if a reporter talks to enough of them one of them is bound to say something stupid. On the other hand, you have to rely on the journalist and the news outlet not to send you down the wrong path or give you the sense that this is a Clinton insider rather than just someone spouting off.

Race is an inherently compromising issue in American culture and politics. And some of what I think is happening here is that it is ricocheting in all sorts of directions in this campaign which is about the heart of the Democratic party.

I don't have any global answer here. This has spiraled pretty far in the last 48 hours. And I'm just now taking stock of it again. Like I said, it's not completely clear to me the mix of intention, inertia and accident involved. But this is explosive. So we're going to do the best we can to tell you what's happening, not to hold anything back but also to be conscious of each step we take as we report on and thus in a real sense relay these increasingly inflammatory statements and reports.

--Josh Marshall

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/063477.php

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. .

[BeyondGeography]

2. "they're really much stupider than I could have imagined"

Hold that thought, Josh.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Clever distraction from Diebold "TRADE SECRET" vote counting?

Seems like it to me. I mean, who cares how much two corporatist candidates--or one corporatist candidate and an undeclared--both supposedly liberal people--trade "hot" racial remarks? For one thing, it just seems so typically Rovian to stir something like this up, for instance, by planting an unnamed Clinton "adviser" at some cocktail party and busting kneecaps to get his/her careless remarks printed somewhere? It's called "divide and conquer."

It seems meaningless to me. Mud wrestling. TV Theater for the knuckledraggers. It doesn't at all seem "important." I think Marshall gives it too much credence, and needs to look for the "hand is quicker than the eye" trick that is being played, by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, or players of their games. What IS Karl Rove up to these days? I know Rumsfeld is trying to get Oil War II going in South America (see Rumsfeld, WaPo, 12/1/07) and was probably behind a couple of dirty tricks down there--"divide and conquer" tricks, as a matter of fact--one of them, to sabotage Hugo Chavez's triumph of diplomacy in getting two FARC hostages released, and another, some business perpetrated by a Miami millionaire (a suitcase full of money) that was supposed to embarrass (and "divide and conquer") allies Venezuela and Argentina. (Caper failed--both governments said it was Bushite dirty trick.) Rumsfeld needs to find some more oil fields for his paymasters. Lots of them down south of the border. And is this Rove's "retirement" pastime--creating spitting matches between the first viable woman candidate for president, and the first viable black candidate for president?

It's the sort of thing he does. Or, are the candidates themselves designing this game, to distract us from something--as I've suggested above, from the EGREGIOUSLY NON-TRANSPARENT, BUSHITE-CORPORATE-CONTROLLED VOTE COUNTING SYSTEM that they are expecting to be elected by, and that just hit a bump in New Hampshire? Is it part of their bargain with the Devil that they have to act to keep this blackholed news story--the most important news story in the history our democracy--out of sight, out of mind?

You gotta wonder about people running for office having so little concern--no concern at all, really--about WHO is counting all our votes, and HOW. But to take a cat fight among "liberals" about "who's the racist?" seriously, at face value...my first reaction was laughter.