> Unless -- as is often the case with the former president -- Bill
> Clinton was operating at a level mere political mortals cannot hope
> to understand, playing chess while we've been watching checkers.
> Obama's is a diminished campaign because of South Carolina, if only
> slightly -- more defensive, more responsive, and just a bit worried
> about being turned into something his candidacy is all about NOT
> becoming: the "black candidate."
>
> "In the longer term . . . the Bill Clinton effect could prove more
> effective for the campaign of the senator from New York," Michael
> Tackett writes in the Chicago Tribune. "The degree to which Obama is
> seen as a black candidate rather than a candidate who happens to be
> black is likely to play a larger role in the upcoming states, none of
> which have such sizable percentages of black voters as South
> Carolina. . . . Bill Clinton is often thought in the moment to be
> doing the wrong thing, when it turns out to be the right thing
> politically."
>
^^^^^ CB: Surely nobody thinks it likely that the winning majority of European Americans would not on their own , without Bill Clinton, have arrived at voting based on race , and not vote a Black person in as President. This is Reaganite racist America still. That racism didn't just suddenly go away.