Ganging Up On Obama

Charles Rangel and John Lewis weigh in. Lewis:

"He is no Martin Luther King Jr. I knew Martin Luther King. I knew Bobby Kennedy. I knew President Kennedy. You need more than speech-making. You need someone who is prepared to provide bold leadership."

Here's Rangel, providing the final touch to the Clinton strategy of accusing Obama of bringing up race in the first place:

"How race got into this thing is because Obama said ‘race,' ... for [Obama] to suggest that Dr. King could have signed that act is absolutely stupid. It's absolutely dumb to infer that Doctor King, alone, passed the legislation and signed it into law."

Obama did not say that King could have signed a law. He did not say "race." He merely called Clinton's condescending LBJ comment ill-advised. Rangel did, however, bring up the cocaine issue again, unprompted. Clintonite Robert Johnson, who clearly lied outright on saying he wasn't referring to Obama's previous drug use, tries this gambit:

"White America is saying, 'He's safe for us, he should be safe for you guys.' We're letting other people pick our leaders."

He sees the Obama candidacy as a nightmare for the Clintons with whom he vacations. It is. But they are finding ways to smear and marginalize Obama and rally their machine and its beneficiaries against him. That's politics. It's not as if I expected any less from the Clinton machine. Maybe others did. You can see this as a sign of worry from an endangered establishment, or simply an indication of who actually wields power in the Democratic coalition, and how they intend to keep it.