The Democrats have begun to fracture on the very bases of their historic primary race this year: race and gender.
The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have started trading allegations of http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2923, and now John Edwards has jumped into the fray on Obama’s side. The party of identity politics appears about to founder on its very premise:
“After staying on the sidelines in the first year of the campaign, race and to a lesser extent gender have burst into the forefront of the Democratic presidential contest, thrusting Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton into the middle of a sharp-edged social and political debate that transcends their candidacies.
“In a tense day of exchanges by the candidates and their supporters, Mrs. Clinton suggested on Sunday that Mr. Obama’s campaign, in an effort to inject race into the contest, distorted remarks she had made about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”‘Mr. Obama tartly dismissed Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion, adding that “the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous.”
“Mr. Obama’s campaign then attacked Mrs. Clinton for failing to repudiate one of her top black supporters for “engaging in the politics of destruction” with an apparent reference to Mr. Obama’s acknowledged drug use in the past. And throughout the day, supporters of Mrs. Clinton and of Mr. Obama each accused the other of injecting race in search of political gain.”
That black supporter was http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2952, who has supported Hillary for years. As Michelle Malkin notes, Johnson made sure to reference the issue of Obama’s drug use as a teenager while extolling the Clintons’ engagement with the black community, and then called Obama “Sidney” in comparing Obama’s campaign to the movie, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?:
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