It took them to give him the ammo that he would not have otherwise had.

The Obama campaign's "fairy tale" gambit was particularly transparent. Commenting on Obama's explanation of why he is more against the war in Iraq than Hillary Clinton, and disturbed by the news media's failure to report Obama's actual voting record on Iraq in the Senate, the former president referred to what had become the conventional wisdom as a "fairy tale" concocted by Obama and his supporters. Time to play the race-baiter card! One of Obama's most prominent backers, the mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, stretched Clinton's remarks and implied that he had called Obama's entire candidacy a fairy tale. (The mayor later coyly told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she had not intended to criticize Clinton: "Surely you don't mean he's the only one who can use the phrase 'fairy tale,'" Franklin said, in a tone that the reporter described as "mock indignation.") Appearing on CNN, one of its pundits, Donna Brazile, hurled the wild charge that Clinton had likened Obama to a child. "And I will tell you," she concluded, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing." With those kinds of remarks--"as an African American"--the race card and the race-baiter card both came back into play. Although Brazile is formally not part of Obama's campaign, her comments made their way to the South Carolina memo, offered as evidence that Clinton's comment was racially insensitive.

Not exactly the best way to get all aboard the Unity Express.  Funny, though, how it looks like the underside of a bus.

The wonder is none of these folks realized that when they said and did anything about Bill and Hillary Clinton to favor Obama that all of it would come back to haunt Obama in the general election.

I'm afraid that the logic and depth of political interest that leads you to your conclusion -- that if Bob Herbert et al make claims about racism those claims ought to be considered suspect and political on their face -- is not shared among the wider electorate.

I agree with you that those claims launched against the Clintons were largely spurious and that they call into question the honesty and judgment of the people who promulgated them.  I just don't think the broader population will follow that argument.

The only thing that makes me feel any better about Herbert's column is that probably the only people who are still reading him are people who are so in-the-tank that they accept what Herbert writes - then and now - as actual fact.  I made an exception today to see more than just the snip BTD provided, and even then, I could not get all the way through it it was so vile.

I'm no McCain fan, trust me.  I listened to part  of the Q & A's from an appearance he made yesterday, and it was awful, just awful; I am no more interested in a President McCain than I am in a President Obama.

But McCain's ad wasn't racist.  And just because the audiences Obama is delivering his they're-going-to-demonize-me speeches appreciated his "warning," doesn't mean Obama's motives and meaning were the purest-of-the-pure; his remarks were clearly designed to (1) float an accusation of something that had not happened as if it already had, (2) eliminate the discussion of race by appointing himself judge and jury on the whole issue and (3) effectively tell people the only way to make up for the consider-them-real-injustices-because-they-are-inevitable, visited upon Obama is to (4) vote for him.