Last January, the leftwing Huffington Post reprinted an article Geoffrey Dunn wrote in 2008 for an African American newspaper “detailing the persistent racism in the Clinton campaign” — or, as the HuffPost’s headline calls it, Hillary Clinton’s “racist dog whistles.”
From Dunn’s 2008 column documenting Hillary Clinton’s “racism and hypocrisy”:
In the aftermath of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary [won narrowly by Hillary Clinton] — a race in which Clinton had a 20-point lead only a few months ago — the racism and hypocrisy of the Clinton campaign were laid bare for all a nation to scorn.
Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he’s black.
In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton’s cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton’s co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somali garb leaked to the press by Clinton’s staff.
In the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton compared Obama’s victory to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. His message was clear: Obama was a marginal, black candidate.
[…]
To anyone who has followed the Clinton campaign closely, it is all too apparent that her top political strategists — reeling from losses from coast to coast and badly miscalculating the grassroots power of the Obama movement — made a tactical decision to go negative, as that would be the only way for Clinton to stop Obama and somehow allow her to steal the nomination.
And go negative they did — with a subtle yet consistent racism underscoring every turn.
Read the rest here.
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