By SONYA ROSS, Associated Press Writer Fri Apr 25, 3:24 AM ET
.......................................................................................................................................................................WASHINGTON - Imagine, for just a minute, the pain of America's first black president.
Not Barack Obama — Bill Clinton.That's about the only explanation for Clinton's lack of brotherly behavior lately: He's in pain.
He is a figurative black man watching an actual black man soak in all the love that black voters used to save for him.
Suddenly, he looks oh so white.
The former president's love affair with black America hasn't soured to the point that he'll be chased out of his office in Harlem. But black people might revoke Clinton's honorary brother card if, out of his pain, he keeps hating on Obama. He's treating the Illinois senator like an unworthy heir to his racial legacy.
At first, Clinton's slips of the lip about black voting habits and the like could be chalked up to election-year politics. Why wouldn't an ex-president try to cajole his party's most loyal voters into supporting his candidate of choice? Especially when that candidate is his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The problem is, nobody bothered to tell Clinton that honorary blackness is also temporary. No matter how much he's done on the subject of race, his brother privileges are always up for renewal.
Clinton learned this the hard way — by watching black people throw support to Obama en masse while kicking aside Hillary Clinton's complaints about the man. If anybody knows what Obama is doing to seduce black voters, it is Bill Clinton. After all, Clinton pushed the very same buttons to claim the black vote for himself when he first ran for the presidency 16 years ago.
"I think that they played the race card on me. We now know, from memos from the (Obama) campaign, that they planned it all along," Clinton groused to the aptly named radio station WHYY on the day before the Pennsylvania primary.
He did not produce the memos or any evidence that they exist, and the Obama campaign denies the accusation.
Still, Clinton accused the Illinois senator of putting an unfair spin on his comparison of Obama's South Carolina primary victory to Jesse Jackson's caucus wins there two decades earlier. Black leaders, black voters and most impartial observers in the media saw Clinton's remarks for what they were — a brazen attempt to marginalize Obama as a "black candidate."
What gets to Clinton, more than anything, is the fact that even black voters who question the Illinois senator's "blackness" still shield Obama against a slap from somebody outside the family — in this case, Clinton himself.
In a game of race cards, Obama wins.
I've always found it incomprehensible that someone, anyone, would call Bill Clinton "the first Black president." Clinton is not "a figurative black man." He is and always will be a panderer.
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