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Hillary Clinton fights racial insensitivity claims

BY LETTA TAYLER | letta.tayler@newsday.com

January 14, 2008

COLUMBIA, S.C. - On a day when she had hoped to woo black South Carolina voters, Hillary Rodham Clinton spent yesterday fighting charges of racial insensitivity and launching multipronged attacks at rival Barack Obama.

Joining the fray was Clinton family friend Bob Johnson, the influential African-American founder of BET, who made a controversial remark seen by some as an insinuation about Obama's admitted use of cocaine in his youth.

Clinton began the day defending her civil rights record to Tim Russert during a combative and occasionally defensive appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." She spoke as debate swirled over whether she had given the late President Lyndon B. Johnson more credit than Martin Luther King Jr. for advancing civil rights.

"The Obama campaign is deliberately distorting" remarks she made about the relative importance of King in passing federal civil rights laws, Clinton said. "I don't think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it's not about race," she insisted.

During the grueling, hourlong interview, the New York senator praised King as one of the people she "admired most" and contrasted his experience with Obama's.

Johnson, a key supporter, went further as he portrayed Clinton as the better candidate on civil rights.

"As an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign could imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that, I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book ... that these two people would denigrate the accomplishment of civil rights martyrs," he said in a warm-up speech for Clinton to a mostly white audience at a women's college here.

Johnson later insisted in a statement issued by the Clinton campaign that he was only referring to Obama's work as a community organizer and that any other interpretation was "irresponsible and incorrect." The campaign has repeatedly come under fire for bringing up Obama's cocaine use and then retracting it.

Behind the scenes, aides were telling reporters they thought Russert was unfairly tough on Clinton on both the King issue and her 2002 vote for a Senate resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq.

Clinton's campaign manager and other supporters also held a teleconference to question Obama's statements on the Iraq war, a theme pioneered by former President Bill Clinton last week, when he called Obama's insistence that his opposition to the war had never wavered a "fairy tale."

Clinton has been criticized by some black leaders who felt she diminished King's role when she praised LBJ's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Both Obama and third-ranked Democratic hopeful John Edwards yesterday pounced on her handling of the issue.

"For them to suggest that we're injecting race as a consequence of a statement she made that we haven't commented on is pretty hard to figure out," Obama said.

The brouhaha came on Clinton's first visit since Nov. 27 to South Carolina, where a majority of Democrats are African-American. Bill Clinton was dubbed the "first black president," but an aggregate of recent polls gives Obama a double-digit edge over his wife in the Jan. 26 primary in this key early-voting state.

New polls also show Obama gaining on Clinton nationwide, and surging two points ahead of her - a statistical tie - among black New Yorkers.

Later yesterday, Clinton adopted a softer tone at a black Methodist church here. "Probably many of you never thought they would see the day when an African-American and a woman were competing for the presidency of the United States," a solemn Clinton said as listeners shouted "Amen!" "I am so proud of my party and I am so proud of Senator Barack Obama."

Quoting King, she added, "Our struggles are really one."

Many parishioners said they doubted Clinton intended to denigrate King. Nevertheless, even Clinton supporters deplored the campaign sideshow. Said Wesley Kennedy Jr., 59, a retired telecommunications executive: "This is too important an election and the stakes are too high to get sidetracked by this."