Bob Herbert: Time for Clintons to Exit Gracefully Before More Damage

To this list, I would have added: If Bill Clinton had resigned--say after he was acquitted by the Senate or before the absurd impeachment began in the House--Al Gore would have run and won easily as an incumbent President. Sigh.

Seeds of Destruction

By BOB HERBERT
The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can’t cut it with that crowd.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

e’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

(Representative Charles Rangel of New York, who is black and has been an absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton’s White House quest, told The Daily News: “I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”)

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now...(big snip)

But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.