The ‘white hands’ ad ran by Jesse Helms in the week previous to his first general election contest with Harvey Gantt was authored by Dick Morris, who has worked for the Clintons in Arkansas and became the architect of their political identity since 1994. In a column published yesterday, Dick Morris said what I had been thinking the past few days, that the Clintons after Iowa have been seeking to make Obama out to be ‘the black candidate.’ What throws people for a loop is that the comments about ML King came before the SC ‘black’ primary, and everyone assumes that they are directed at African-American voters. Actually both Bill and Hillary commented on the topic right before NH. Since Hillary’s comments, she has gained new momentum with white voters after the race had been effectively declared over, maintaining a seven point cushion over Obama over the past few days.

On the day after Obama’s Iowa victory, Morris in his NY Post column with Eileen McGann said “Obama - by winning in a totally white state - shows that racism is gone as a factor in American politics.”

Yesterday Morris had new observations to share: “(The Clintons) embarked on a strategy of talking about race -- mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., for example -- and asking their surrogates to do so as well...

“According to the Rasmussen poll of Monday, Jan. 14, Obama leads among blacks by 66-16 while Hillary is ahead among whites by 41-27. The overall head to head is 37-30 in favor of Hillary.

“It does not matter which specific reference to race can be traced to whom. Obama's campaign has resisted any temptation to campaign on race and, for an entire year, kept the issue off the front pages. Now, at the very moment that the crucial voting looms, the election is suddenly about race. Obviously, it is the Clintons' doing. Remember the adage: Who benefits?”

The Morris and Clinton saga is critical to the careers of both Morris and Clinton. When Clinton lost his gubernatorial reelection in 1980 in Arkansas' response to the thirtysomething Yalie kid’s motor vehicle tax, Clinton joined forces with Morris for the 1982 race and joined the Democratic Leadership Council, getting the job back. In 1994 he started corresponding with Morris again during Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America campaign against him, and upon losing the House over Hillary’s ability to botch a universal health care proposal that the public overwhelmingly wanted, Morris became the most influential advisor to Clinton, the architect of ‘triangulation,’ and chaired his successful reelection campaign. During the period when Morris advised Clinton on race politics, Clinton fired Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders and signed the welfare reform bill written to Gingrich’s specifications that he had previously vetoed.

When Morris got caught with the call girl in the Willard, Clinton sent him packing with two months to go in the election. Morris said publicly that the disclosure was insufficient reason to can him, effectively ending his career as a campaign operative, and I think that is why he has run an obsessive campaign against the Clintons starting with a publication of a tell-all the next year.
Media Matters, the center-left watchdog organization started by former GOP smear artist David Brock (The Real Anita Hill) after he was outed, has called attention to how Morris teamed up with David Bossie, a renegade Clinton-hating Dan Burton staffer that produced with Morris the conservative response to Fahrenheit 911, to do a ‘swift boat’ style documentary (as Morris characterized it) on Hillary. Morris’ opinions and credibility should be seen with this perspective, but he knows Bill and Hillary’s political mindset concerning what Leon Panetta called ‘the dark side’ of race politics more than anyone.

In addition to insinuating that Obama, despite more support of independents and better polling in general election head to heads against every Republican, is less electable because he is black and thus less likely to pass reforms in the tradition of LBJ, Hillary Clinton sat beside Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson and watched while Johnson made racially tinged insinuations about Obama’s admissions of early drug use. Imagine if a white politician said Obama was ‘doing something in the neighborhood - and I won’t say what he was doing.’ Hillary then said she had no input on the statement and Johnson said he was referring to Obama’s community organizing, which is obviously dishonest as ‘I won’t say’ wouldn’t apply to community organizing.

Why does Johnson support the Clintons? He has a film company backed by JP Morgan Chase, an equity fund financed by The Carlyle Group, and a hedge fund backed by Deutsche Bank. The Carlyle Group, cited by Michael Moore and others for a board of directors including both the Bushes and the bin Laden family, currently has Arthur Levitt, Clinton’s SEC Chair, as its Senior Advisor, and William Kennard, Clinton’s FCC Chair, as its Managing Director.

Gloria Steinem’s piece in the New York Times has provoked an inevitable response from African-American intellectuals. She doesn’t need to win the argument, and she doesn’t and can’t, but her objective is to initiate a conflict that divides white women and blacks. There are fourteen woman Senators and one African-American Senator (Obama) and both Hillary and Elizabeth Dole have been treated as major presidential candidates. Carol Moseley-Braun was not treated seriously by the media because she had lost her Senate seat to a white challenger, not showing Obama’s skill at winning white support.

Steinem and Hillary are making the argument together that women are more marginalized but blacks can’t win. Steinem’s is the same approach that Dick Morris utilized for Helms’ benefit: make an enfranchised class feel disenfranchised so that they rally together in opposition to the disenfranchised. Obama, of course, has never said that anyone should vote for him because African-Americans are disenfranchised, which is why the Clintons’ strategy is significant.

If Hillary wins the nomination, it will come at the cost of her having divided the party amongst racial lines, despite the African-American candidate being less divisive, more popular amongst conservatives and moderates, and more electable in November. This is a price the Clintons are willing to pay because they don’t care about the party, as evidenced by how they let the Congress go Republican in the 90s, and because after Iowa the pundits left their presidential hopes for dead. Hillary's current lead for the nomination has vindicated her cynical strategy for gaining the support of white Democrats.