Times of London columnist Alice Miles minces no words in calling Barack Obama for playing the race card without merit against Hillary Clinton:
What a shame that a contest that has the world gripped, that is transforming international opinion of the United States, that has shown America in its best and most brilliant light, threatens to descend into a pathetic slanging match over race. What a shame for the centre Left, which had everything to cheer about in the stunning choice between, potentially, the first female and the first black president, that they are allowing the contest to slip into an idiotic series of unproven claims about racial bias.
On Monday Hillary Clinton called for a truce reminding everyone that “Senator Obama and I are on the same side”. Hear hear. But how did it come to this?
The thin catalogue of complaints against the Clinton campaign from the Obama campaign were unfounded, manipulative and self-indulgent. At best they called into question the oversensitivity of Mr Obama, at worst they showed him willing to play a divisive race card that is damaging the entire Democratic Party and tarnishing a great and historic electoral contest for the centre Left. The whole episode has convinced me he isn’t tough enough for the White House.
For since when has referring to somebody’s past admitted drug use – if indeed the Clinton campaign ever intended to do that, which is far from clear – been a racial slur? More racist, I would say, to equate drugs with blacks, and that’s what the Obama campaign is doing, not the Clinton one.
As for Mrs Clinton’s statement that Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality was realised only when President Johnson managed to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress? No more than fact, surely; an attack on Mr Obama’s lack of experience, certainly, but hardly a slur upon King. Mr Obama’s campaign is twisting things so that a comment about any black man is a comment about him, just as any attack on him is an attack on all black people. I ask again: who is playing the race card here?
She’s unafraid to say what we’re afraid to say in the U.S. And I think she’s right.
