Super Duper Doppler for Super Duper Tuesday

Bill Clinton, laddie in waiting, was caught on video in an impromptu gaggle with reporters while exiting an event in South Carolina.

A question about race baiting and trying to paint Obama such and such triggered one of those red faced, finger wagging fits of pique. How dare anyone ambush him with a question that nobody inside the event which just ended cared about?!

He was seven steps from being off camera and his entourage had gone by in a blur. That could have been that, as the unanswered ambush rarely gets airtime. But Bill turned around, all Theresa Heinz Kerry, and played a game of blame the media for all its "shove it" newsworthiness. (Film at 4:00, 4:10, 4:20, 4:30, etc.) Bugs Bunny used to say at times like these: "Of course you know this means war."

Just as the Clintons wanted Obama to show more respect than implying they rode Reagan's model of electability and corporate massage through two terms, making a chasm out of a mole hill, the media, thus challenged, was committed to review every last drop of an issue which relies mostly on quick cut editing, with all its predictability.

That's the fierce urgency of now, Bill Clinton style. What are you being asked about at every presser now, Senator Obama? A gift from the Clinton machine to finish the run up to the 5th.

Did you catch Bob Herbert's opinion piece yesterday? He reminds us of the especially reprehensible campaign of surrogate attacks which a flustered Barack Obama expressed in the recent debate as not knowing who he's running against sometimes.

Bob Kerrey going off on the madrassa, middle name Hussein, closest Muslim relatives, not that there's anything wrong with that tangent. And Andrew Young making way too much of Bill Clinton as first black president and Hillary's experience as Machiavellist in chief during the bimbo eruptions. Fascinating, in an unintended revelation kind of way.

The funny thing about the Clintons is that when the former mayor, UN ambassador and current Hillary supporter said “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack,” neither Bill nor Hillary were anywhere to be found for comment. No impromptu gaggles.

I heard commentator Craig Crawford say how a broken ankle had kept him from following the buses around in the various primary states and how he was forced to stay abreast of the campaign using all the resources that ordinary folks have at their disposal. (Craig and Rupert Pupkin, both in agreement. At once reassuring and frightening, in an unlisted phone number kind of way.) The lack of access didn't appear to stifle him. He observed Saturday morning, on the MSNBC extravaganza, that South Carolina's primary was the result of a consideration of race by the Democratic National Committee itself.

Recall that it allowed only four states to go earlier than Feb. 5. Two nods to tradition plus two nods to states with more people of color and in different regions of the country. It was anthro-geo-kick-the-crap out-of-the-GOP- centric, as it were. The injection of race was an a priori but only in the sense that these latter contests would be decided by inversely larger than average populations, just as the first two were by much smaller.

It was Hillary Clinton who tried to make clumsy political points from MLK's legacy during the week of his birthday celebration.

She contrasted herself, unaided, with someone whose speeches can remind you of that very oratory and whose presence in the race is one more living embodiment of Dr. King's dream, as is hers.

Hillary was trying to counter punch in the hope/experience argument (which many find nonsensical in the first place when both candidates are admirable) and in so doing tipped her hand many times over.

First, there was callous disregard for the dates on the calendar. This was not a good time to begin a sentence with high praise for Dr. King and then slip in the conjunction "but." You Tube videos virtually auto-record when stuff like that happens. Tellingly, she credited the occupant of the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson, with the follow through it took to complete Dr. King's work in the form of legislation.

Methinks the Constitution doesn't care whose signature it is, only that it reflects government of the people, by the people and for the people. It was the awesome power of the presidency and the rule of law which allowed further building on Dr. King's foundations.

An appropriate comment, if campaigning for all South Carolinian Democrats' votes were paramount, and perhaps the only one which would have allowed their short hairs to settle back down after such an unfortunate conjunction, would have been to link Dr. King with the Democratic Party and progressivism in general.

But then that wouldn't trump hope, now would it? Rather, it gives further cause for it. Her whole experience argument was decapitated by a rookie mistake at attack politics. She earned what she got with one mighty big "but."

Then Bill Clinton slipped more into the weekend's preconditioning: that Obama was supposed to win Saturday because he's black. Just in case Hillary should lose, he appeared to have been saying, it wouldn't have had anything to do with Dr. King or any free exercise. It would be because of the relics of tribalism (which King devoted a lifetime to change) which remain to this day in South Carolina.

Oh give me a break! (À la Network, everyone run to your window and shout "give me a break!" Better now, savvy reader?)

Ten days is within the long range forecasting capacities of Super Duper Doppler for Super Duper Tuesday. Seek shelter immediately. Bring in the children and pets and, in states where the southern strategy survives or in states with southern strategy envy, bring in the livestock as well.

My state votes a week from Tuesday. I'll be following the content of character index because, as we say around these parts, polling is for losers. 

Next week: Blowin' It

RETURN