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From the very beginning, the premise and the promise of Barack Obama’s campaign was that it would transcend race. And last autumn the Obama team also knew this was the only way it could win. The Clinton brand among black voters was so strong, so unbreakable, so resilient a force that even the first credible black candidate for the presidency remained stuck 20-30% behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters. She was, after all, the wife of the “first black president”, as the author Toni Morrison called Bill. She had almost all the black political establishment behind her. Her husband, from...

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully. Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd. “There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton. There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to...

Hillary Clinton is pinning her hopes on the party’s superdelegates to gift her the nomination. But America’s most senior black congressman warns she is playing with fire and could force a split in the DemocratsSarah Baxter in Fayetteville, North Carolina The most senior black congressman in America had a tough warning for Hillary Clinton this weekend as she fought to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Barack Obama. “We’ll be playing with fire if we interfere with the voters’ choice,” James Clyburn, the party’s chief whip in the House of Representatives, told The Sunday Times. “African-Americans will feel cheated.” Clinton...

In an interview with me this morning, senior Hillary adviser Harold Ickes confirmed that Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a key topic in discussions with uncommitted super-delegates over whether Obama is electable in a general election. The comments from Ickes, who is Hillary's chief delegate hunter, are to my knowledge the first on-the-record confirmation from a Hillary adviser that the Wright controversy is a subject in conversations between the Hillary campaign and the super-delegates her advisers are trying to win over to Hillary's side. In the wide-ranging interview, Ickes also: * Said that it was possible that Hillary forces on the...

(AP) A new controversy flared up in the Democratic presidential race Saturday over remarks by former President Bill Clinton whom Barack Obama's campaign accused of using divisive tactics and unfairly trying to question the Illinois senator's patriotism. Retired Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, a co-chair of Obama's campaign, said he was astonished and disappointed by recent comments the former president made while speculating about a general election between Obama's Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Republican John McCain. Standing next to Obama on stage at a campaign rally in southern Oregon, the retired Air Force chief of staff repeated Bill Clinton's...

WASHINGTON — Despite the celebration of Barack Obama's electoral successes as evidence that the nation has moved beyond racial divisions, signs are emerging of a small but unmistakable race-based resistance to his historic White House bid. Beneath Obama's easy win in Mississippi on Tuesday, exit polls show a state polarized along racial lines, with white Democrats there rejecting his candidacy 70 percent to 26 percent, while 9 of 10 blacks voted for him. It's a dramatic reflection of a recurrent pattern most pronounced in the South. Geraldine Ferraro, in 1984 the first woman nominated by a major party for vice...

Confusion erupted Thursday night amid reports that a prominent African American supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's had changed his mind. Georgia Rep. John Lewis, who is also a Democratic superdelegate, was reported by the New York Times as having decided to switch his superdelegate vote from Clinton to Sen. Barack Obama after Lewis's district, around Atlanta, went for the Illinois senator.

MILWAUKEE — Representative John Lewis, an elder statesman from the civil rights era and one of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most prominent black supporters, said Thursday night that he planned to cast his vote as a superdelegate for Senator Barack Obama in hopes of preventing a fight at the Democratic convention. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” said Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who endorsed Mrs. Clinton last fall. “Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.” Mr. Lewis, who carries great influence among...

HARRISBURG, Pa. - Gov. Ed Rendell, one of Hillary Rodham Clinton's most visible supporters, said some white Pennsylvanians are likely to vote against her rival Barack Obama because he is black.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Gov. Ed Rendell, one of Hillary Rodham Clinton's most visible supporters, said some white Pennsylvanians are likely to vote against her rival Barack Obama because he is black. "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate," Rendell told the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in remarks that appeared in Tuesday's paper. To buttress his point, Rendell cited his 2006 re-election campaign, in which he defeated Republican challenger Lynn Swann, the former Pittsburgh Steelers star, by a margin of more than...

the Hallmark Channel. ...offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come. The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user, “the black candidate” . The result? Black America...

6,173 2% Biden, "Joe" - 136,927 36% Clinton, Hillary - 1,925 1% Dodd, Christopher J. - 13,028 3% Edwards, John - 1,405 0% Kucinich, Dennis J. - 220,501 57% Obama, Barack - 4,253 1% Richardson, William "Bill" Very bad.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. - Barack Obama routed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the racially-charged South Carolina primary Saturday night, regaining campaign momentum in the prelude to a Feb. 5 coast-to-coast competition for more than 1,600 Democratic National Convention delegates. Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina was running third, a sharp setback in the state where he was born and scored a primary victory in his first presidential campaign four years ago. The Associated Press made its call based on surveys of voters as they left the polls. About half the voters were black, according to polling place interviews, and four out...

When Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign first began, there was reason to think she would be hard to beat in a primary. Despite her Iraq vulnerability and assorted baggage, she seemed to have an impenetrable bulwark in the black vote. "Bill Clinton's popularity with blacks has been presumed to carry over to her and help her win the important South Carolina primary ... and other similar Southern primaries," explained Newsweek in November 2006. Newsweek wisely noted that the candidacy of Barack Obama could change that presumption. But, even after Obama joined the race, some Clinton advisers didn't fret. Last January, one...

WASHINGTON (AP) - South Carolina is where two presidential candidates lectured the media for focusing on race, but behind the scenes worked furiously to use the state's diversity to their advantage. Race is an uncomfortable thing to discuss, especially in a national political campaign where you are trying to win the support of a majority white electorate. Nevertheless, both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton had a strategy in South Carolina focused on race.

Earlier this morning, I noted that some Democrats have discovered that the Clintonian Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy meme may actually have been drizzly pap. In the Los Angeles Times today, Jonathan Chait reluctantly comes to that conclusion. He writes that the conservatives who have long railed against the lies and dirty tactics of the Clintons have been somewhat vindicated by the primary campaign tactics of Bill and Hillary: Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not...

TONE MOUNTAIN, Ga., Dec. 22 — Thad Mayfield, 47, was not happy with the remarks that led to Trent Lott's demise as Senate Republican leader. But as a native of Greenwood, Miss. — just 20 miles from Mr. Lott's birthplace — he says he understands where Mr. Lott was coming from. He also says he believes he understands why the Republicans forced him from his leadership post."It certainly goes against what the president wants to project as the Republican image," said Mr. Mayfield, a black management consultant who now lives in Lithonia, Ga. "Like at the Republican convention, when...