U.S. Democratic Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton likes to say she deals in reality, not in dreams. She’s ready to be President on day one. She’s campaigning on her record as a nuts-and-bolts problem-solver, unlike certain other candidates – read Barack Obama – who rely on hope and charisma and peoples’ yearning for positive change.

Well, it may be that Clinton is a little bit right about that. Human nature doesn’t ever change much, and history is littered with stories of great reformers who achieved power only to find that the system changed them, rather than the other way around. Obama is charismatic, but he’s only one guy. He doesn’t walk on water and he will not end war, hunger or poverty.

Even so: How could Clinton, a Democrat, stoop to the base, cheap, scurrilous, underhanded tactics that came to light Monday morning on the web? It’s enough to turn a political cynic off cynicism.

You all remember Matt Drudge. He’s the enterprising web journalist who broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Drudge has made a career of going where mainstream media fear to tread. He deals in scandal – the juicier the better. If traditional media have ethical quibbles about breaking a particular story, Drudge will give them a helping hand.

So this week, when an unnamed Clinton campaign staffer circulated a photo of Barack Obama wearing traditional Somali dress – including a white turban – while on a visit to Africa in 2006, Drudge popped it up on his front page, www.drudgereport.com. More than likely, the photo is still there now.

What motivated Clinton’s people to pass around this photo? Let’s see. Here we have a candidate for political office, a black candidate, in a photo with another black man, an African. Both are decked out in foreign clothing. Obama looks ridiculous, like a cross between the Dalai Lama and an Afghan mullah.

Here’s the message of that photo, direct to middle America from the Clinton campaign: Obama, though he was born in the United States, is not a real American. He’s a foreigner. He’s ‘other’. He wears a white turban, for heaven’s sake. Who else do we know who wears a white turban?

The distribution of this photo was clearly a calculated move to play on racism and middle-class, conservative America’s fear of ‘the other’. It makes no difference that Obama is an American, this photo says. He’s a foreigner at heart, and we know what foreigners do, don’t we? They just can’t be trusted.

As of noon Monday, the Clinton campaign had not denied passing the photo around. Nor had anyone on the campaign apologized for doing so. That will change in the days ahead, almost certainly. But the damage has been done. Not to Obama, but to Clinton. Given Obama’s string of recent primary wins, her campaign was already grasping at straws.

Now it has descended into the muck. Shame on Hillary Clinton and shame on her campaign.

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michael.dentandt@sunmedia.ca

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