Richard Cohen Reciting Clinton Talking Points

So tarring Obama with Farrakhan had no effect. Now Richard Cohen passive-aggressively puts his hopes in the racism of white people. Cohen argues that Obama "played the race card" by labeling Clinton's comments about King as "ill-advised." The very putrid essence:

The turning point for Obama actually came in New Hampshire, when Hillary Clinton said that Martin Luther King's "dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964." This, of course, only reflected historical reality and was, moreover, a slap not at King, but at Johnson's predecessor, John F. Kennedy, to whom Obama is often compared. (Both Caroline Kennedy and her uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, have since endorsed Obama.)

Possibly we shall someday learn that Hillary Clinton's remark was diabolically intended to offend blacks. I doubt it. Whatever the case, though, some important African-Americans quickly reacted -- and the Democratic primary campaign was never again the same. Not only did the Clintons not back off, but they seemed to savor the moment. As for Obama, instead of adroitly taking the sting out of what Hillary Clinton had said by shrugging it off, he called her comments "unfortunate" and "ill-advised."

The upshot was the racially divided vote we saw in South Carolina, one Bill Clinton immediately likened to Jesse Jackson's victories in 1984 and '88 -- in other words, yet another asterisk, a race-based triumph and therefore of negligible importance. Obama won big, bigger than expected. But a lot of his margin came from African-Americans, particularly, and unexpectedly, women, many of whom were supposedly in Hillary Clinton's corner. He got about 80 percent of the black vote.

Witness a columnist breathlessly filling inches. First of all, the idea that "the Dream" wasn't realized until Johnson is--racist or not--just wrong. Did Brown v. Board not happen? Was the Mongotmery bus boycott just erased from history? Was Hartsfield not the mayor of Atlanta? This is not a slight to Johnson--he bravely sacrificed the future of the Democratic party for the future of the country. But he isn't the start of the realization of "the Dream." In fact, "the Dream" was well in motion before King ever even made his speech.

But moreover, this idea that somehow Barack winning the black vote is ultimately a minus is complete bullshit. I remember this time last year when pundits were crowing about it being a problem that black people seemed to favor Clinton. I am sorry, a win is a fucking win. The idea that whites will reflexively flee Obama because he called a Clinton comment "ill-advised," and because a lot of black people like him is a cynical, unprovable assertion. We have no way of knowing whether it's true.

Furthermore, South Carolina's primary was only racially divided because Edwards and Clinton did so poorly among blacks, not because Obama did so poorly among whites. Barack got a quarter of the white vote, and basically tied Clinton for white men. Where he really lost was among white women--but that has more to do with Clinton's status as an important first, than any sense that Obama had morphed into Marcus Garvey.