TPM Election Central reports:
An anonymous Clinton adviser made an interesting comment to The Guardian, explaining the difference between Hillary supporters and Obama supporters.
"If you have a social need, you're with Hillary," the aide said. "If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool."
Before everyone starts hyperventilating over this, a word of caution from Josh Marshall:
I have a bit of a hard time knowing what's going on here. If this is really the word the Clinton campaign wants its surrogates putting out, they're really much stupider than I could have imagined. On the other hand, 'advisor' is a notoriously slippery phrase that can mean almost anything. Campaigns have hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who in one fashion or another 'advise' them. A lot of those people aren't under any kind of real control. And if a reporter talks to enough of them one of them is bound to say something stupid. On the other hand, you have to rely on the journalist and the news outlet not to send you down the wrong path or give you the sense that this is a Clinton insider rather than just someone spouting off.
Race is an inherently compromising issue in American culture and politics. And some of what I think is happening here is that it is ricocheting in all sorts of directions in this campaign which is about the heart of the Democratic party.I don't have any global answer here. This has spiraled pretty far in the last 48 hours. And I'm just now taking stock of it again. Like I said, it's not completely clear to me the mix of intention, inertia and accident involved. But this is explosive. So we're going to do the best we can to tell you what's happening, not to hold anything back but also to be conscious of each step we take as we report on and thus in a real sense relay these increasingly inflammatory statements and reports.
Josh is right to urge caution here, but will anyone listen? Of course not. The quote has been published by a reputable newspaper, so it's already out there. Both sides are going to have to respond. And no matter what, the Clinton camp has some explaining to do.
Obama's people are already portraying this as part of a larger pattern, a claim Greg Sargent doesn't quite seem to follow. I can't be certain here, but I suspect this goes back to Clinton's defense of her "false hopes" rhetoric, which included the statement that MLK's dream only became a reality because of LBJ (more here). That, combined with more recent events such as Hillary supporter Anthony Cuomo's claim that you candidates "can't shuck and jive at a press conference," have rapidly made race an explicit part of this campaign.
So suddenly and almost out of nowhere, we're discussing race. Which would be fine and good, were it not for the fact that it looks like we're headed down into the gutters to do it. Call me crazy, but I suspect we'll be hearing much more about this over the coming weekend.
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