A recent Gallup poll showed that two-thirds of Americans have given “quite a lot” of thought to the 2008 Presidential election, the highest number recorded by Gallup in January of an election year since 1992. The number is higher with Democrats at 70% and lower with Independents, 58%, and exactly equal to 2/3rds with Republicans.

This is probably due in no small part to the soap opera that the race for president has become, especially on the democratic side between Obama and Clinton(both Bill and Hillary).

Race has become a huge part of the Democratic race, and with today being Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and with the South Carolina(the first state primary where black voters make up a large part of the electorate) Democratic debate(sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute no less) being tonight it seemed a perfect time to explore this soap opera in more detail.

Race really wasn’t prominent in the race until Hillary Clinton’s comment in response to Obama talking about False Hope in which she said,

Dr King’s dream began to be realised when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.

Since that time Hillary’s comments have been spun to be a direct attack on the civil rights movement, and as her saying that it look a President to get results, and not the marches or anything like that. That she was saying, Obama may be a visionary, like Dr. King, but I’m the President that will get things done.

Since that time, Hillary has seen her support amongst African-American’s drop substantially(see reactions of several pundits here and here), but black voters in the south are still split between Clinton and Obama.

Hillary’s comments, however, are just the tip of the iceberg in the drama between her and Obama. In many ways she has been engaging in a good cop, bad cop routine with Bill, from even before her comments on MLK, when he said voting for Barack Obama is voting for someone who is asking voters to “roll the dice.”

It continued in Nevada when he said this,

Today, when my daughter and I were wandering through the hotel, and all these culinary workers were mobbing us, telling us they didn’t care what they’d been told to do, they were going to caucus for Hillary, there was a representative of the organization trotting along behind us, going up to everybody that said that, and said, “If you’re not going to vote for our guy, we’re going to give you a schedule tomorrow so you can’t be there.” So is this the new politics? I haven’t seen anything like that in America in 35 years.

and when referring to Barack Obama’s position on Iraq,

Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.

Jon Meacham has a piece in Newsweek entitled, “Leading Democrats to Bill Clinton: Pipe Down” which quotes Greg Craig, President Clinton’s lawyer during impeachment as saying,

If the Hillary’s campaign can’t control Bill, how is Hillary’s White House going to control him?

Someone who spoke to Bill Clinton according to Meet the Press said,

I don’t care about this stuff, about my image as the former president. I’m going to win this campaign. I’m going to go door-to-door in the black neighborhoods of South Carolina, church-to-church

Bill Clinton is not content to let the black vote go solidly to Obama. The attacks have gotten to be so much in some people’s minds that someone has started a Clinton attacks Obama Wiki, and there’s a website that chronicles both Obama’s and Edward’s attacks on Clinton called Attacktimeline.com(paid for by Hillary Clinton for President).

Just today on the eve of the South Carolina debate, Barack has challenged Bill’s truthfulness saying,

I have to say just broadly, you know, the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling. You know, he continues to make statements that aren’t supported by the facts, whether it’s about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq, or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.

Just the day before he gave a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, MLK’s church based on the quotation by Martin Luther King, that, “unity is the great need of the hour.”(see the full text of the speech here).

Just a few hours ago, Hillary’s adviser Wolfson, called Obama’s claim that Bill is fibbing a “Right Wing Talking Point.”

This all isn’t directly related to Bill and Obama though, with BET founder Robert L. Johnson attacking Obama, and hinting at past drug use. Comments he later apologized for and which the Clinton campaign called “out of bounds”. Still others unrelated to the campaign are questioning whether or not Obama is playing the “race card” including Times of London columnist Alice Miles.

All this framed by a backdrop of allegations of voting irregularities in Clark County, Nevada by the Clinton campaign(on top of the above allegations by Bill about Obama supporters and others), and also against two historic campaigns, leading some to question, sexism, racism: which is more taboo? Obama won in Iowa, an open process, but lost in NH despite the polls, leading some to ask, is this the Bradley effect?(and also here and here, although some have pointed out that Obama didn’t get less votes than he was polling Hillary just got more than she was, which the second link debunks) The idea that people will say they will vote for a black candidate, but in the privacy of the voting booth be unwilling to do so. Feminist Gloria Steinem wrote an article for the New York Times entitled, “Women are Never Front-Runners”. Which is more taboo is hard to say, but Obama has performed much poorer amongst older voters is it because of race?(Obama also credited his win in Iowa to the youth turnout which MSNBC confirms), and maybe it could mean a latent racism in older people, or maybe it could just be an establishment versus the new hotness(thanks Allison!).

Historians today have said to be fearing that MLK’s legacy is being lost. Gallup reports that Americans view Obama and Clinton about equally as being able to effectuate change in Washington. So, maybe the historians are right, but not just about civil rights, but judging from the above discourse in the Democratic race about unity as well.

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