Clinton, McPeak, Obama & the 'Black Menace'

The ugliness of the Democratic Presidential primary race was given another layer this week, as former President Bill Clinton made a controversial statement, and Obama supporter Retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak issued a controversial rebuke, followed by a tacit demand by the Clinton campaign for McPeak to step away from the Obama campaign.

Former President Clinton's remarks:

"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country," said the former president. "And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

Emphasis mine. The remark is seen by many as questioning Barack Obama's patriotism, even as an email smear campaign paints the Illinois Senator as, alternately, a closet jihadist and a Black Power militant bent on transferring all of America's wealth to Africa while inciting riots.

General McPeak's response:

"I grew up, I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I've had enough of it," McPeak said yesterday, according to the AP.

And the reaction from the Clinton campaign, from Saturday's conference call:

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer advised the press "to ask why the Obama campaign brings Gen. McPeak out on the campaign trail."

There, I've set up the pins. After the jump, we'll try to knock 'em down.

The Clinton campaign's astonishment that General McPeak would compare President Clinton's statement with the actions of Joseph McCarthy is unsurprising, if inauthentic. The meaning is unmistakable, and the notion that Bill Clinton, or any gear in the Clinton machine, says anything that isn't first cooked up in a committee and Rorschach tested to death is ludicrous. Clinton press conferences are not dialogs, they are recitations of a set of mantras.

Whether the Clintons have a hand in it or not, and I believe they do not, they are most certainly aware of the very organized grassroots smear campaign against Senator Obama, begun with the insistence that he is a super-secret Muslim time-bomb, then morphing into the current iteration, that he is some kind of black agitator, holding democracy hostage with the threat of race riots.

In fact, we now have MSNBC's Pat Buchanan dreaming up some sort of epidemic of black-on-white violence and a forty trillion dollar handout. It is as though Jeremiah Wright gave everyone permission to fear black people again.

Although they did not create this fantastic, Manson-esque hysteria, they certainly seem to be exploiting it. Senator Clinton's equivocation about Obama's religious faith, the release by a Clinton staffer of the photograph of Obama in Somali tribal garb, President Clinton's comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, the Clinton campaign's reference to Barack's campaign "throwing bombs", and now questioning his patriotism. In any one of these instances, one could grant the Clintons the benefit of the doubt, but they have not earned it.

McPeak's comparison is apt, and he ought not to apologize. If Clinton had said of Obama's campaign tactics, "Hey, I'm just calling a spade a spade" he would no doubt demand an apology from the offended.

This is straight out of the Karl Rove playbook, turn your opponent's strength into their weakness. Obama seeks to heal racial divisions in this country, so paint him as a racist.


I can understand a lot of white people falling for this notion of "black racism." I walk among them, I hear many of them say things like, "Why does there have to be a Black History month?" or, "Nobody ever handed me anything", and they feel absolved because whatever offense they do acknowledge, they were not personally involved in.


The problem is, these "typical white people", of which I am one, fail to realize that it is an offense to deny, to disbelieve, the injury of the black race that continues to this day. You may not be a bigot, but when you tell the black guy that you work with that "you had to see the whole Rodney King tape", or that Amidou Diallo shouldn't have reached for his cellphone, or that your own color-blindness is proof that racism is fixed, you're telling that guy that you can't be trusted.


There's a site on AOL called Black Voices, one of a host of fragmented media outlets that cater to black people. Why do you think that Black Voices exists? Because everywhere else, the black voice falls on deaf ears.


I encourage you to peruse Black Voices, or Afro-Netizen, or Black Agenda Report, or the New Black Panther Party, and see for yourselves if there is some sort of gathering Black Menace.


I also encourage you to vote for Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, based on a reasonable evaluation of each candidate's positions and qualifications. Don't do it to keep the boogieman in the closet.