COLOR HIM BLACK

Barack Obama started out to be a young refreshing candidate who happened to be black. He avoided playing the race card at all costs. That appealed to a lot of white voters, especially younger ones. He presented himself to all voters, both balck and white, as the candidate of change and hope. But something happened on the way to the forum. Obama became the black candidate just as Jessee Jackson before him had been.

How and why did that happen? The Clintons, both Bubba and Hillary, together with their surrogates deliberately "done" it to him. They played the race card in order to turn Obama into a "Jessee Jackson" candidate. Before Hillary and Bubba colored him black, Obama enjoyed high polling numbers among young and well educated whites, both men and women.

Now that he has been painted "the black candidate," he is loosing many of his white supporters because, as such, they think he is more concerned with black issues than with the issues that concern them most. And, that is exactly what Hillary and her husband, "the first black president," set out to achieve. They know that, despite any black anger over their injection of race into the campaign, in the end Hillary can still count on the support of blacks if she is the Democratic nominee.

The race issue was brought on by Hillary Clinton's statement that Martin Luther King's dream was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A number of angry black leaders then attacked Hillary for belittling Dr. King. Instead of leaving well enough alone, Obama made the mistake of issuing his own statement criticizing Hillary's comments. She immediately pounced on Obama by accusing him of injecting race into the campaign, an example of the kettle calling the pot black, no pun intended. Then, Bill labeled Obama's campaign a "fairy tale" and told voters his wife was going to lose in South Carolina "because she is white."

The Clintons and their surrogates have been relentless in doing a hatchet job on Obama. Surrogate Bob Johnson, founder of BET (Black Entertainment Televison), in a speech to a black audience in South Carolina, stated that the Clintons were championing black issues "when Obama was doing something in the neighborhood - I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book." That was a clear reference to Obama's admitted use in college of marijuana and cocaine.

Both Hillary and the former president are borderline pathological liars. Hillary's response to Johnson's drug statement was to make the ridiculous assertion, a bald-faced lie, that he was referring to Obama's work as a neighborhood organizer. Meanwhile, hubby Bill has been campaigning for her with outright lies and distortions about Obama's record. When Obama remarked that (President) "Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," the Clintons attacked Obama for praising Ronald Reagan and Republican party ideas, which of course, he never did.

The savaging of Obama has led Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and relentless critic of President Bush, to condemn Bill Clinton for resorting to attack dog tactics. And Robert Reich, President Clinton's Secretary of Labor, has now stepped forth to attack his former boss for "injecting race" into the presidential campaign. Even Senator Edward Kennedy jumped into the fray by angrily denouncing Bubba for playing a part in injecting race into the campaign.

Why should we expect anything different, what with all the lies perpetrated on the American public by both Clintons when the former Governor of Arkansas ran for the presidency and when he occupied the White House. One of Hillary's latest lies was a statement that John McCain would "love" to keep our troops in Iraq for the next 100 years. That is not at all what McCain said. The Arizona Senator stated that we may have to keep our troops in Iraq for another 100 years if that's what it takes to defend ourselves against Islamic terrorism.

However, all the lies about Obama are not nearly as devastating as Bill and Hillary's success in coloring him black. Poor old Barack, inexperinced in the ways of dirty politics, fell right into their trap of "Jessee Jacksonizing" his candidacy. Not only have the Clintons succeeded in eroding his white support, but they have also exploited the animosity between Latinos and blacks to galvanize Hispanic voters against Obama.

Obama has been forced to run not only against Hillary, but against the former president as well. While the Clintons played slash-and-burn politcal hardball, Obama for too long played slow-pitch softball. Having been marginalized as the black candidate, Obama's chances of winning the Democratic nomination now seem somewhat bleak even if he wins big in South Carolina.