By ,
Published January 13, 2015
Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:
Color Bind
Many Democrats have been unhappy with the racial overtones in some of the exchanges between the Clintons and Barack Obama. And now one prominent Democrat knows exactly who to blame — Republican candidate Mike Huckabee.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn says Huckabee — "opened Pandora's Box" when he injected race into the South Carolina Democratic primary.
Clyburn said on MSNBC this morning — "It was not until Huckabee sort of brought the Confederate battle flag into this thing... Not only did he talk about the flag in a disparaging way but he talked about what the people of Arkansas would do with the pole of the flag...That's the kind of stuff that brought this back into [the Democratic presidential] campaign and it was not here until he did that."
A Huckabee insider dismissed the claim by saying — "they blame us Republicans for everything."
Over the Top?
The Hillary Clinton campaign has been highly critical of Obama for positive comments about former President Ronald Reagan.
Obama said President Reagan "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."
But columnist E.J. Dionne writes that Bill Clinton was even more effusive in his praise of President Reagan during the 1992 campaign. Clinton lauded Reagan's "rhetoric in defense of freedom" and his role in "advancing the idea that communism could be rolled back." — "The idea that we were going to stand firm and reaffirm our containment strategy, and the fact that we forced (the Soviets) to spend even more when they were already producing a Cadillac defense system and a dinosaur economy, I think it hastened their undoing."
Stump Speech
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton told an audience in South Carolina Wednesday — "Hillary was the first U.S. senator to call Darfur genocide."
Chelsea Clinton made a similar statement at Stanford University earlier this month. But those statements do not appear to be true.
Congressional records indicate Republican Senator Mike DeWine was first to expressly call it genocide on the Senate floor in June of 2004 — followed by Democrat Russ Feingold a month later. Hillary Clinton's first mention of Darfur and genocide occurred that September.
To the Rescue
And John McCain's mom is not too happy with the support her son is getting from the Republican Party base.
In fact — she says — "I don't think he has any... I've not seen any help whatsoever." Roberta McCain said in an interview on C-SPAN that she does nevertheless believe her son will get the nomination — but — "I think holding their nose they're going to have to take him."
— FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/what-one-democrat-blames-for-racial-tensions-between-clinton-and-obama