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Hillary stirs debate

Democrats rally in support, as GOP calls her racially divisive, in reaction to Monday's 'plantation' remark

BY GLENN THRUSH AND MARTIN C. EVANS | STAFF WRITERS

3:00 AM EST, January 18, 2006

WASHINGTON - The furor over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's "plantation" comment is showing no sign of being gone with the wind.

In a fiery Martin Luther King day appearance at a Harlem church, New York's junior senator claimed Republican leaders run the House "like a plantation," quashing Democratic dissent. For good measure, she predicted the Bush White House will go down as "one of the worst" in history.

Republicans jumped on the issue yesterday, labeling her a racially divisive leftist, while Democrats and black leaders rallied behind the presumptive 2008 presidential frontrunner.

"Is this the real her, the real Hillary? I don't know," said Rev. Al Sharpton, who hosted Clinton at the civil rights policy forum Monday. "But if it is, I like it."

Clinton's sudden swerve back to her core African-American supporters was noteworthy after efforts to shed her image as a liberal, but political observers downplayed the notion that the comments will damage her.

"I don't think it's going to have a great deal of impact because people who would be offended by the remark would never vote for her anyway," said John Pitney, a congressional scholar at California's Claremont McKenna College.

Curiously, Clinton failed to make a ripple three months ago when she made similar statements on CNN comparing the GOP leadership to plantation owners. "They're running the House of Representatives like a fiefdom with [former Majority Leader] Tom Delay as, you know, in charge of the plantation," she said during a Nov. 18, 2004 interview.

Clinton is not the first politician to use the analogy. In 1994, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who engineered the GOP takeover of the House, employed it to describe the Democrats who then controlled the chamber. "They think it is their job to run the plantation, it shocks them that I'm actually willing to lead the slave rebellion," he told the Washington Post.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Clinton's remarks were "out of bounds" and her anti-Bush statements signaled that "the political season may be starting early."

"She was pandering, playing the race card," said Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), adding that he considered Clinton's statement an "aberration, and not part of a pattern."

Republican National Committee spokesman Aaron McClear accused Clinton of being "racially divisive."

Clinton's team defended her remarks as an accurate portrayal of Capitol Hill under GOP rule. "I can't imagine too many voters rising in defense of the corrupt practices of the GOP House," said Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson.

Sharpton, who has clashed with the senator from time to time, said, "It's absolutely ridiculous the right wing would be offended. Wasn't it the Republicans who didn't want to make Dr. King's day a national holiday in the first place?"

Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, who has endorsed Democrats and Republicans, said Clinton's use of "plantation" will only endear her to African-American voters.

"I don't think anybody in that audience or in the black community is at all upset by the remarks she made," Butts said in Harlem. "I think she used it in a context that black America understands."

Thrush reported from Washington; Evans from Long Island. Bryan Virasami in New York also contributed.