Ben Smith at Politico is finally delving – somewhat into what was done – never before addressed in the media

but there’s one sore point they’re not quite ready to absolve: Leaving the impression that Bill and Hillary Clinton have a race problem.

“I am not a racist,” Clinton said Monday in a testy interview with ABC News in Monrovia, Liberia, in response to a question that wasn’t quite related to that subject. “I’ve never made a racist comment and I never attacked [Obama] personally.”

Of course Ben Smith goes out of his way to contend that

Obama himself never suggested that the Clintons had harbored racial animus

When he directly accused all Clintons voters of racism, it kinda follows

This confirmed that McCain hit a nerve with his “race card” statement:

The depth of the anger in Clinton’s circle became clear Friday, when McCain’s chief strategist compared his candidate to Bill Clinton, and the Clintons seemed to accept the analogy.

“Say whatever you want about Bill Clinton, but it’s deeply unfair to suggest his criticism of Obama was race-based,” McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told Politico, after his campaign blasted Obama for suggesting the McCain campaign would use his race against him. “We knew it was coming in our direction because they did it against a president of the United States of their own party.”

Clinton’s staff declined to comment, but her campaign communications director, Howard Wolfson, appeared on Fox News later that day to, in effect, back Schmidt up.
“I think the McCain camp watched our primary on the Democratic side very carefully and they know that any accusation of racial divisiveness can be very, very harmful for a candidate’s prospects

nameless aides are then brought in

Indeed, some welcomed McCain’s frontal response to Obama’s vague prediction – quickly retracted by his campaign – that McCain would try to “scare” voters with the fact that Obama “doesn’t look” like other presidents, a variation on a line Obama had used in the past to (at times, accurately) describe attacks from the fringe and viral emails.

One Clinton aide said a recent Clinton conference call had featured another Clinton advisor remarking that “the chickens have come home to roost” — in the form of McCain’s denunciation of Obama’s comments.

Chickens indeed – I am filing this under karma. Again, for those who feel “Hillary should also have…” – she did. They did. And every word out of their mouths was twisted by the media/Obama surrogates.

A lot of PUMAs (some of them African Americans) became PUMAs because of this. Me, I made my confession of being a racist now .

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