I think Conason was trying to say that it was a total accident. Clinton wasn’t willing to play on racist fears, her comment was made without any real contemplation of race issues. It was an innocent – in every sense of the word – gaffe.

Do I agree with Conason? I’d certainly like to. I hope Clinton wasn’t willing to win the nomination through appeals to racism.

But hell, I don’t know. She stuck by her support for the war well into 2005. She was a Senator from one of the most anti-war states. It’s hard for me to believe that she didn’t make a political calculation that cost thousands of lives. If she’s capable of that, she may very well have been capable of racist appeals in the primary.

That said… the standard you invoke above could easily be applied to Barack Obama. Barack Obama gave a tremendous speech about race – for white people. Go back and look at the text. How many times did he point to specific racial grievances that exist today? 13% of black men can’t vote, about a million black men working for (and I use this term intentionally) slave wages in our prisons, gross disparities in school funding, etc. etc. etc.

And Obama is going to act like racism is dead? That it impacted Wright’s generation but not his own?

I dunno. We used to have honest conversations about race. Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Martin Luther King Jr., Eldridge Cleaver… They spoke inconvenient truths.

Today, we’ve got a nearly invisible Jesse Jackson and a similarly marginalized Reverend Al Sharpton. Hell, even Julian Bond is lying low as a University professor.

One caveat: Barack Obama may be downplaying the race card because he needs to subordinate immediate truths to the larger good of attaining a position in which he can affect needed change. I think that’d be a fair defense that would differentiate him from Hillary Clinton.

But everything else I wrote about the lack of leadership and frank discussion re: race issues… well, that stands.