This   does  not  reflect  well  on    Obama's   ability    to  stand  on   PRINCIPLE,  does  it?    

Had   he  supported  Lamont  instead,  he  and  the other  Democrats  might  have  had  another   vote in the  Senate  to  get  legislation  passed.  

It fits seamlessly into the rest of his message that he's framing it instead as Washington insiders denying the importance of anyone but themselves to make things happen - insiders denying the power of regular people to rise up and create change.

One thing I would have liked to have seen though would be, instead of just saying he, Edwards, and Clinton all share the same goals when it comes to civil rights and social justice that he'd thought to include the Democratic Party and emphasize that these are shared Democratic values.

He said he believes the quote betrays a belief on her part, "that the intricacies of the legislative process were somehow more significant than when ordinary people rise up and march and go to jail and fight for justice."  

He called that a "fundamental difference" between them.

So we now have a fundamental difference between Sen Clinton and Sen Obama.

I wonder if he realizes that there were riots in the streets during that time? Plenty of people faught and went to jail and some died.

On the night MLK was shot .... I was only 2 blocks from the riots in Peoria, IL. I was so scared. The only city that did not suffer was Indy due to RFK.

It does seem like the media were itching to bring race into it.  It seemed to me race got reinjected - the Shaheen stuff had largely calmed down after Clinton apologized personally to Obama - into the campaign by pollsters and pundits looking to cover their butts in NH by pushing the Bradley effect.  And if you look at how they've truncated Hillary Clinton's quote and Andrew Cuomo's quote, it certainly looks like they were more interested in inflaming the situation than calming it down.  (By saying that I'm not tryiing to reopen whether the quotes are offensive, just pointing out that they are, at the very least, MORE offensive when taken out of context.)

Isn't  Obama  claiming   he  was  always  against  the  war?    

The Power and the Inspiration

I've heard much bemoaning of this as a non-issue, on supposedly liberal blogs, from people who just want it to go away.  Perhaps they should tell that to Mark Penn and the Clinton campaign who are apparently petitioning their operatives to pursue this avenue.

Hillary Clinton made a huge rhetorical misstep when she held up Lyndon Johnson as the doer, in contrast to Martin Luther King who she implied was merely the inspirational leader and dreamer of nice dreams that others had to make reality.  It was not only a huge gaffe but factually incorrect, a fanciful rewriting of history as it were.  But I suppose it's the kind of thing you would expect coming from someone who grew up as a Goldwater Republican, as we all know Barry Goldwater himself did not support the Civil Rights Act.  It's also the kind of mindset you would expect from a Washington insider who believes that all power and change flows from those corridors.  Another piece of revisionism that is not supported by the history of the United States. It saddens me that Hillary Clinton forgets who is the real driving force behind this nation, WE THE PEOPLE.  Such arrogance does not bode well for someone who aspires to our presidency.  

Here's a little historical reminder for Wilentz and Hillary, the civil rights movement was a movement of the people, it was their concerns that drove the legislation that became the law of the land.  It was the people in the movement who paid the price and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King paid a much higher price than most.  As we know he was assassinated for his part, but long before that he began paying a price.  As anyone who knows the history can tell you, the doctor who performed the autopsy on Dr. King noted that his body had incurred the kind of wear and tear usually only found in the bodies of 60 year olds, yet Dr. King was only 39.  Obviously King had been paying the price for his advocacy for decades before he was murdered.  

And how many other African-Americans laid down their lives in this fight?  There's the names that we remember like Malcolm and Medgar but there were thousands before them, most of whom died in obscurity between the 1860s and the 1960s, not to mention the tens or even hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who lost their lives in this country for no other reason than that they had dark skinned, because US law offer them little or no protection.  And the history goes back well before abolition, with Dread and Harriet Scott who fought for years in the US courts where they had virtually no chance of winning.  Yet they kept on fighting in the hope that one day their sacrifice would finally bear the fruits of liberty for their posterity.  It only it took another 118 years for African-Americans to become full-fledged citizens.

Yes Black people in America paid a heavy price in their struggle to achieve equity under the law.  But it wasn't until the rest of America, White America, got to see fire hoses turned upon children on their nightly news, and pictures of young people lynched and murdered in their local papers, before the majority of Americans woke up, and said enough, no more of this, we must put an end to such repression and inequity.

Lyndon Johnson may have done the right thing, but it was the people of this nation who prompted him to step forward and take that action.  He was merely the leader of the moment who realized that his job as president was to listen to his people. But in truth he did no more than any man of conscience would've found himself compelled to do under such circumstance.  

So when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton slights and diminishes the achievements Martin Luther King, in order to make a rhetorical point to bolster her presidential bid, she deserves to be pilloried and condemned.  Because she didn't just slight the memory of Dr. King alone, she slighted and diminished the contribution of every one of those people down through history who first dreamed of change and then made it happen.  It wasn't Lyndon or any of his people who paid the ultimate price in order to achieve equity under the law, it was MLK and the Black folk of this nation who paid for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and they paid with their blood, the blood of their children, and with the blood of numerous generations before them.

So instead of giving Hillary and her campaign a pass, I suggest the Clinton supporters advise their candidate to check herself before she wrecks herself.

I know many will question Obama's motives, saying the politics had started to run away from him....