Is the media trying to make this a two way thing. The Clintons started this, and continue in a desperate and destructive pattern of attacks against Obama. The media, including Time Magazine, make this a two way thing, when it is pretty clear that Obama has done little more than defend himself.

Whenever longtime Democrats gather to note how the chemistry and calculus of the 2008 campaign seem to favor their party this year, one or another will always add some version of the following: "Yeah, but we could screw this up before it's over."

After the past few days, the pertinent question to ask is, is the crack-up happening already? Far-fetched as it would have seemed a month ago, the seeds of self-destruction are being planted in the war of coded words about race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The bickering has exploded in the space of a week into Topic A in the Democratic race, supplanting for the moment the war and the economy and health care — and shows no sign of a quick resolution.

So yes, are the Democrats about to screw it up yet again?

Both campaigns are stoking this fire — and worrying at the same time about what this could do to them in the fall. They ought to be concerned: Keep this up and neither candidate may be able to marshal the votes from the various corners of the Democratic coalition that he or she will need in the fall. As pollster Andrew Kohut has noted, a party which found that it had at least two candidates who were seen as widely "acceptable" to its various factions just a few weeks ago could soon find that happy consensus has evaporated.

The mess began —as these things almost always do — in a normal tit for tat between the candidates. After Obama was poised to surge past Clinton after Iowa, Clinton charged that Obama was raising "false hopes" with his soaring rhetoric that emphasized ends over means. Obama skewered Clinton right back in New Hampshire, asking where the nation would be if both JFK — in making a manned mission to the moon a goal — or Martin Luther King Jr. (in his 1963 Lincoln Memorial speech) had instead shut down their visions and told America they were simply too hard to achieve. Delivered with humor and always to soaring applause, Obama's was a devastating rejoinder.

But then Clinton came back and, far less artfully, said that King's visions were great, but it took an experienced politician like Lyndon Johnson to get them enacted. At the very least, Clinton had equated the sometimes crass master of the legislative backroom with one of America's patron saints. (The real problem is that Clinton seemed to put LBJ on a pedestal higher than King's.) That was probably not her intention, but neither was this her best example in the deeds-not-words crusade she was on. In any case, at that point, things began to unravel.

Now we have both campaigns accusing the other of stoking the fire, of deliberately misunderstanding the other (and there is a lot of that going on, here, too) and both sides have had their various lieutenants and seconds trying to "help" explain things, which almost always makes things worse. That much was clear over the weekend, when BET founder Bob Johnson, in trying to defend the Clintons, appeared to all the world to be bringing up Obama's admitted history of drug use (Johnson later claimed he was actually referring to Obama's history as a community organizer, a laughable explanation that only dug the hole deeper.)

I have always like Jack Cafferty, and it is pretty clear that he has been moved by Obama's campaign. He was one of the first journalist I have seen to point out that this has been mostly a Clinton thing, while Wolf Blitzer appears to fall all over himself trying to make this a 50/50 thing.

Jack wrote an excellent piece on the subject on his blog:

For one brief moment after Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses, it looked like we might have actually outgrown our petty racial bickering in this country.

It didn’t matter that Obama had run a dignified, intelligent campaign without so much as the mention of race. The people who have an interest in keeping the country divided along racial lines couldn’t wait to get started. Do you realize how many morons would go through the rest of their lives ignored and irrelevant if we could ever get over the racial garbage?

Now the racial fires are burning brightly once again.

The last two days, we’ve seen the Obama and Clinton camps embroiled in accusations that are steeped in race. Hillary Clinton is defending her recent remarks on civil rights. She’s suggesting that Obama’s campaign distorted what she said in an effort to inject race into the contest.

For his part, Obama has dismissed Clinton’s suggestion, saying “the notion that somehow this is our doing is ludicrous.” Obama is also describing her earlier comments about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. as “unfortunate” and “ill-advised.”

The Clintons find themselves in unusual territory here, when you consider that Bill Clinton was once dubbed “America’s first black president.”

Read the whole thing.

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