US News

WILD BILL CLINTON STRIKES AGAIN

WASHINGTON – Shoot-from-the-lip Bill Clinton has struck again.

A day after Barack Obama’s overwhelming victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton in South Carolina, the spotlight was back on the former president – this time for dismissive comments he made comparing the Illinois senator’s campaign to the failed presidential candidacies of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

While his wife campaigned in Tennessee and Obama stumped in Georgia, the media focus was once again on Bill Clinton, who said on Saturday: “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.”

The message: that Obama might peel off a few Southern states with sizeable black populations like Jackson did, but he couldn’t forge a successful nationwide candidacy.

Sen. Clinton attributed her husband’s comments to emotion.

“Well, I think it’s human nature. I think that the spouses of all three of us have, you know, been passionate and vigorous defenders of each of us and, you know, maybe got a little carried away,” she said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

She chalked it up to “sleep deprivation” on the campaign trail.

Liberal bloggers were outraged by Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama to Jackson.

Mickey Kaus, writing on the Web magazine Slate, called the comment an “attempted ghettoization” of Obama’s candidacy.

Obama responded on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday that Clinton was dwelling in the past.

“I think that that’s his frame of reference – the Jesse Jackson races,” Obama said.

“That’s when, you know, he was active and involved and watching what was going to take place in South Carolina.”

“I think that a lot of South Carolinians [last week] looked at it through a different lens.”

Asked whether he was the “Jesse Jackson of 2008,” Obama responded, “Jesse Jackson ran historic races in 1984 and 1988, and there’s no doubt that that set a precedent for African-Americans running for the highest office in the land. But, you know, that was 20 years ago.”

Obama got nearly a quarter of South Carolina’s white vote, while Jackson got 5 to 10 percent in 1984.

Political analyst Rhodes Cook noted that Obama’s huge Carolina victory was helped by a coalition that included white liberals, academics, wealthy suburbanites and intellectuals.

“This is not a Jesse Jackson candidacy. This is not a narrowly based insurgent candidacy,” Cook said.

“If you’re adding to that a good chunk of the black vote, then you’re highly competitive.”

And Obama told a boisterous rally of 9,000 in Alabama yesterday that he disproved of the idea “that if you get black votes, you can’t get white votes” and vice versa.

Underscoring Obama’s broad coalition, Ted Kennedy, the godfather of the party’s liberal wing, is throwing his support behind the first-term senator – adding a powerful establishment to Obama’s effort to topple Sen. Clinton. His famous niece, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, endorsed Obama yesterday.

Sen. Clinton plans to head to Florida for the state’s primary tomorrow – even though she and her opponents pledged not to campaign there because the state scheduled its contest before party rules allowed, and the party says Florida’s delegates won’t count.