This is the latest news on Hillary Clinton's campaign in South Carolina -- almost the entire report from Katharine Seelye at the New York Times.
Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, who is campaigning today in South Carolina with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, just raised the specter of Barack Obama’s past drug use. He also compared Mr. Obama to Sidney Poitier, the black actor, in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
At a rally here for Mrs. Clinton at Columbia College, Mr. Johnson was defending recent comments that Mrs. Clinton made regarding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She did not mean to take any credit away from him, Mr. Johnson said, when she said that it took President Johnson to sign the civil rights legislation he fought for.
Dr. King had led a “moral crusade,” Mr. Johnson said, but such crusades have to be “written into law.”
“That is the way the legislative process works in this nation and that takes political leadership,” he said. “That’s all Hillary was saying.”
He then added: “And to me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood – and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book – when they have been involved.”
Moments later, he added: “That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me, for a guy who says, ‘I want to be a reasonable, likable, Sidney Poitier ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ And I’m thinking, I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t a movie, Sidney. This is real life.”
A former Clinton campaign official in New Hampshire had to resign last month after he publicly suggested that Republicans would probably use Mr. Obama’s drug use in his youth, which he first wrote about in his memoirs, against him.
From the look of the accompanying photo, Senator Clinton was standing on stage with Johnson as he made these statements.
There's nothing very wrong with Clinton's stated positions on many key issues. What is very wrong is what's emerging about her character -- her brittle arrogance, her increasingly visible anger, sense of entitlement, her untrustworthiness. If she goes on like this and actually wins the nomination, a lot of people who might have voted for her just because she's a Democrat may in fact stay home because Clinton has come to epitomize the dregs of the Democratic leadership of the past decade -- the worst of the DNC and DLC.
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An even newer report just in minutes ago at the Times has this from Clinton: "Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton suggested Sunday that Barack Obama's campaign had injected racial tension into the presidential contest..." more here ...
Curiously, this is being billed as "damage control."
