The New York Times
Monday 14 January 2008
Washington - There's an old joke people here in the capital like to tell about Charles E. Schumer, the New York senator, and over the years I'm sure it's been used to describe other politicians, as well: The most dangerous place to stand in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a bank of television cameras.
Well, that may be, but it seems to me that the most dangerous place to be in the rest of the country is between the Clintons and an elected office.
Just this weekend, after all the recent attacks against Barack Obama involving his kindergarten essay and cocaine, the "fairy tale" of his antiwar stance, we found out that the Nevada teacher's union with ties to the Clintons is suing to keep workers on the Vegas Strip from being able to caucus in their workplaces, since most of those workers belong to unions that have endorsed Mr. Obama.
Meanwhile, Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, made yet another elliptical reference to Mr. Obama having used cocaine. Mr. Johnson tried to walk it back yesterday by saying that he was only referring to Mr. Obama's days as a community organizer when he said Mr. Obama "was doing something in the neighborhood - and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in the book." Sure, because community organizing is not the kind of thing you'd want to speak of in public, with children around. Better to let people find out on their own.
What's most confounding about this latest turn into ugliness, though, is the Clintons' remarkable capacity to cast themselves as the victims in every fight. And so here is Hillary Rodham Clinton accusing Barack Obama of somehow injecting race into the campaign, because she found herself in a world of trouble for her own comments about Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson. Now, I really do think she was intending only to make a sensible point about the value of experience in the White House, but look, the Clintons embody the generation that invented identity politics and political correctness. If Mrs. Clinton couldn't guess at how that comment was going to land in the black community, then she must have been suffering amnesia.
I wrote last week about how Mr. Obama was facing a perilous moment in his campaign. It seems to me that the same is true of the Clintons, and they may need to step back and briefly reflect. Both Clintons now find themselves in an unfamiliar reality, the kind of all-out war for the nomination that Bill Clinton twice managed to avoid. They will get all kinds of advice from people whose career opportunities are at stake and who will do or say anything to win. They are surrounded by overzealous politicians and interest groups willing do whatever it takes to shut down Barack Obama and deliver their states to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
It must be a kind of nightmare for both Clintons to be running, at this moment, against a talented black man, to be caught in an existential choice between losing their mythical status in the black community or possibly losing to a candidate they feel certain does not deserve to win. But only they can afford to be concerned right now with their own historical legacy, about seeing all that they have accomplished on behalf of their party and its commitment to fairness and equality blown away in the space of a few months. No one else is going to protect all that for them. No one around them is going to take the long view, because that's not the way supporters think.
No one expects Mrs. Clinton to stand down and let Mr. Obama make his case unchallenged. She could, however, send a clear message to the cogs in the machinery she's built that there is a line she will not cross. She could tell her Nevada allies that the job of the Democratic Party she grew up in is to make it easier for people to caucus, not harder. She could tell Robert Johnson that he needs to apologize, the same way she forced Bill Shaheen, her New Hampshire co-chairman, to resign last month. She can make it plain to all those people trying to get jobs in the next Clinton Administration that there is way to win-a rough and combative way, even-that nonetheless won't destroy all the good that the Clintons, at least for a lot of Democrats, have come to represent.
Nevada's Democratic Caucus Stirs Lawsuit
By Brendan Riley
The Associated Press
Monday 14 January 2008
Carson City, Nevada - The Nevada caucuses are becoming a proxy for the racially tinged fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, with Barack Obama's campaign criticizing Hillary Rodham Clinton's allies for a lawsuit that could prevent some minorities from participating.
On Friday, six Democrats and a teachers union connected to Clinton filed a lawsuit claiming the rules enabling Las Vegas Strip waitresses, dishwashers and bellhops to caucus inside nine resorts violate state law and federal equal protection guarantees. Other caucus-goers lack the same access, the suit argues.
The Clinton campaign has said it's not involved in the lawsuit. The Obama campaign says it may not be a coincidence that Clinton's allies are the plaintiffs.
Obama also suggested the timing was notable, since the suit was filed Friday - two days after he was endorsed by the powerful Culinary Union. That group's 60,000 members make it the largest union in the state, and nearly 40 percent of its members are Hispanic, its leaders say.
"Obviously the notion that some of the same people who helped to put together the caucus structure are now challenging it in the wake of the Culinary Union endorsement is a little troublesome," Obama told reporters Monday in Reno, Nev. "But we're confident that our people are going to show up, and I think we'll do very well."
The Clinton campaign at first distanced itself but then echoed part of the lawsuit argument - a risky strategy in Nevada, where blacks and Hispanics make up nearly a third of the electorate.
The nine special locations inside hotel casinos were meant to make it easier for employees in the state's biggest industry to caucus from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. - but were restricted to workers employed within 2.5 miles of the Strip.
Bill Clinton on Monday defended the suit, saying the caucus rules unfairly favored one group over another.
"I think the rules ought to be the same for everybody," the former president told more than 550 senior students at Green Valley High School near Las Vegas. "I would question why you would ever have a temporary caucus site and say only the people that work there, i.e., the people that we know are going to vote in a certain way or we think they will, (are) able to caucus."
The plaintiffs are the Nevada State Education Association, its president, Lynn Warne, and five others. Debbie Cahill, the deputy executive director of the teachers' union, is a Clinton supporter and a member of the campaign's Nevada Women's Leadership Council.
Two senior partners of the law firm handling the suit, Kummer, Kaempfer, Bonner, Renshaw and Ferrario, have donated to Clinton in the past. Also, Clinton ally and former Rep. Jim Bilbray is an attorney at the firm.
The state Democratic Party unanimously approved the caucus rules last March, and the Democratic National Committee signed on in August. Four of the six plaintiffs are members of the committee that approved the rules.
Political consultant Dan Hart, who is a teachers' union operative, termed such speculation of a Clinton campaign maneuver to use the lawsuit to win the caucuses "political gossip." He said he heard the lawsuit was in the works and advised the teachers' union about a month ago.
"I think everybody better start taking a look at this thing, figure out whether the process is fair and stop playing this political game of Clue - it's the Clinton campaign, in the library, with the candlestick," Hart said. "The questions should be, 'Does the suit have substance? Are there issues we need to correct and are we going to do something to correct them?'"
Obama drew cheers at a Culinary Union event Sunday when he said the rules were fine until the union decided "'I'm going to support the outsider, I'm going to support the guy who's standing with the working people instead of the big shots.'"
"You don't win an election and you don't serve democracy by trying to keep people out," Obama said. "You're supposed to try to bring them in and encourage everybody to get involved."
Asked about the lawsuit while campaigning in Reno, Clinton said she was aware of it and hopes it "can be resolved by the courts and the state party because, obviously, we want as many people as possible to be able to participate. ... In the meantime, I'm just going to campaign as hard as I can here in Nevada."
A poll released Monday by the Reno Gazette-Journal shows a statistical tie among Obama, Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards.
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Associated Press writers Nedra Pickler and Kathleen Hennessey contributed to this report.
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