Formula for Trouble

From the Campaign Spot last night:

I think Bob Krumm has a good point. If you're Hillary Clinton, and you've spent the past week insisting that your husband didn't mean to call Barack Obama's campaign "a fairy tale", that you didn't mean to downplay Martin Luther King and overplay Lyndon Johnson in the civil rights effort, that you didn't approve of one of your supporters suggesting Obama dealt drugs, that it's coincidental that two staffers have been fired for spreading rumors that Obama is a Muslim, that you don't approve of your supporter Andrew Cuomo suggesting that Obama has to do more than "shuck and jive" at press conferences...

Click here for the kicker.

David Brooks on the Dems' identity trap:

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Clinton is suffering most. She is now accused, absurdly, of being insensitive to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bill Clinton’s talk of a “fairy tale,” which was used in the context of the Iraq debate, is now being distorted into a condemnation of the civil rights movement. Hillary Clinton finds that in attacking Obama, she is accused of being hostile to the entire African-American experience.

Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

Apparently she told Tim Russert the individual bit on MTP. (Guess she is relishing "finding her own voice", out-Oprah-ing Obama and being independent from Bill.)

Well, this blares out to those of who value individual responsibility and freedom but as Brooks points out you won't find these kinds of voters in the Democrat party. For more evidence of that, check out my new blogger friend Black and Red.

And of course, for all Obama's happy talk, his membership in a church whose pastor advocates black separatism does not bode well for a post-political over the rainbow coalition, and as Brooks also points out, may not sit well with Latino voters. (Perhaps giving the family values GOP a chance at this electorate.)

Apparently Clinton and Obama are trying to ratchet down the inflammatory rhetoric, but Charlie Rangel either didn't get the memo or was instructed or chose to ignore it. The Swamp:

Rep. Charles B. Rangel said in a CNN interview that Obama was "absolutely stupid" in his part of the exchange over the relative influence of Rev. Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson in passing civil rights legislation.

"How race got into this thing is because Obama said 'race,'" Rangel said in an interview. "But there is nothing that Hillary Clinton has said that baffles me."

So it goes on.

Related posts: Dems UnCivil War, Reaping the Whirlwind, Turn on Rush