Clinton Apologizes to Black Voters for Racial Comments
WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did something Wednesday night that she almost never does. She apologized. And once she started, she didn’t seem able to stop.
The New York senator, who is in a tight race with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, struck several sorry notes at an evening forum sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a group of more than 200 black community newspapers across the country.
Her biggest apology came in response to a question about comments by her husband, Bill Clinton, after the South Carolina primary, which Obama won handily. Bill Clinton said Jesse Jackson also won South Carolina when he ran for president in 1984 and 1988, a comment many viewed as belittling Obama’s success.
“I want to put that in context. You know I am sorry if anyone was offended. It was certainly not meant in any way to be offensive,” Hillary Clinton said. “We can be proud of both Jesse Jackson and Senator Obama.”
“Anyone who has followed my husband’s public life or my public life know very well where we have stood and what we have stood for and who we have stood with,” she said, acknowledging that whoever wins the nomination will have to heal the wounds of a bruising, historic contest.
“Once one of us has the nomination there will be a great effort to unify the Democratic party and we will do so, because, remember I have a lot of supporters who have voted for me in very large numbers and I would expect them to support Senator Obama if he were the nominee,” she said.
The Clintons long have enjoyed overwhelming support from black voters, but that has been eclipsed during the primaries and caucuses by enthusiasm and support for Obama, who has pulled huge margins among black voters. Arguments over the role of race and gender have flared up repeatedly throughout the contest between Obama, who would be the nation’s first black president, and Clinton, who would be its first female one.
Earlier in the day, Hillary Clinton supporter and fundraiser Geraldine Ferraro gave up her honorary position with Clinton’s campaign after she said in an interview last week that Obama would not have made it this far if he were white. Obama said Ferraro’s remarks were “ridiculous” and “wrong-headed.”
Of Ferraro’s comment, Hillary Clinton told her audience: “I certainly do repudiate it and I regret deeply that it was said. Obviously she doesn’t speak for the campaign, she doesn’t speak for any of my positions, and she has resigned from being a member of my very large finance committee.”
As first lady and senator, Clinton rarely cedes an inch to her critics. On the issue of her vote to authorize the Iraq war, for instance, she steadfastly has refused to apologize, coming close by saying she regrets it, despite calls from many anti-war voters in the party to make a more explicit mea culpa.
Her third conciliatory statement of the evening was more in keeping with that fighting stance.
Asked about the government’s efforts in the Gulf States after Hurricane Katrina, Hillary Clinton turned an apology into a criticism of President Bush, who happened to be speaking at a Republican event in another room at the same hotel.
“I’ve said it publicly, and I say it privately: I apologize, and I am embarrassed that our government so mistreated our fellow citizens … It was a national disgrace,” she said.
Hillary …………Stay Strong. They will keep throwing this sh… at you, and you are a strong woman. Thats why you will be an AWSOME leader.
Class and Dignity.
PRESIDENT HILLARY CLINTON!
as if this country is’nt already headed for hell in a hand basket. It will only be a huge shove if miss clinton or her opponent are elected. Our fellow citizens miss treated in katrina. Tax payers keep all of those pitiful miss treated people alive anyway. All I can say is god blees this country and this election or whatever you want to call it.
I think the Federal govt. should apologise to every American taxpayer for the waste of our tax dollars spent to rebuild the city under the sea. The next major hurricane that comes through, it will happen again.
Oh My God!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Give Me A Break!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What about all the people that make fun of Blonde women.
We should have a movement about Blonde jokes or insults about women.
Women were not allowed to vote until AFTER black men.
THIS IS SICKENING!!!!! I am so sick of the RACE card.
We will NEVER have equality if everyone is silenced or afraid of saying something offending. THIS IS JUS REDICULOUS!!!!
I am blonde so I may not spell right, but I am black so you should not say anything.
Obamas church is against white people and that is NOT RIGHT.
We CANNOT TALK about:
Obamas Serious Drug USE,
His Middle Name
His Outfits, for fun or for political reasons,
His Church
His Friends in jail or on trial
His wife saying Americans hav LOST their SOULS
His “Advisors”
His race in the same phrase as his qualifications.
His similarity to a cartoon character. Even my son looks like him SO WHAT!!!!!!!!
More to come………I’m sure. I am also sure that we WILL BE SILENCED.
Now everyone go SALUTE the Red White and Blue “0″
I’m so effing tired of blacks crying racism over every little thing. Guess what blacks, most whites don’t want to oppress you. But then you cry racism when there is none and alienate whites.
Hillary is sucking up again. She’s a loser
Do as Obama says, not as he does!! He has a different set of racism rules for different people. He goes to church & listens to his preacher spew out racist remarks all day long.
Obama’s preacher speaking on Natalie Holloway;
“Black women are being raped daily in Darfur, Sudan, in the Congo and in Sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn’t make news,” Wright said in the August 2005 edition of Trumpet Magazine, a publication of his Trinity United Church of Christ.
But, “One 18-year-old white girl from Alabama gets drunk on a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and ‘gives it up’ while in a foreign country, and that stays in the news for months!” he added. “Maybe I am missing something!”
Obama’s preacher speaking on 9/11;
“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” he wrote on page 7. “White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared,’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”
THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, OBAMA!! We don’t need your kind running our great country!! If you did not agree with the way the preacher was preaching you would have walked away from your church 20 something years ago!!
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!!
JOE VALENTINO THAT IS SUCH EVIL STATEMENT, YOU WILL ROT IN HELL WITH YOUR EVIL HEART.
Bullyboy Sean Hannity Gets A Lesson In World Affairs
Reported by Ellen - April 4, 2007 - comments
Chalk up foreign policy as the latest proficiency in which college dropout and non-serving Sean Hannity hoists himself as an expert. Unfortunately, for Hannity, the two guests on last night’s (4/3/07) made quick work of his chickenhawk “strategy” for dealing with Iran. With video.
In the second of a two part discussion, Hannity adopted his bullyboy tone immediately with guest Ken Taylor, the former Canadian ambassador to Iran. Taylor had previously told Alan Colmes that the Iranians are trying to prove that they can be dealt with diplomatically and, Taylor suggested tactfully, perhaps talks should begin.
In Round 1, Hannity said, “At some point, militarilily, I assume, we’re going to have to deal with Iran.”
No, not according to a real expert. Taylor told Hannity that that would be “catastrophic” and that, strange as it may seem, Iran is one of only two countries (along with the US) that can bring some degree of stability to the “tinderbox” that is the Middle East. “There’s no other country with the population, with the military force and with the history that Iran has at the moment.”
That was so not what “Let’s get to war with Iran, already (but don’t ask me to do any fighting)” Hannity wanted to hear. In Part 2, he combined his taunting, schoolyard bully tone with insulting words. “Perhaps you’re not paying attention to what the Iranians are doing and saying… It sounds to me with all due respect sir, that you’re living in a fantasy world.” Soon after, he actually laughed in Taylor’s face.
But Taylor was the consummate diplomat and knew how to hold his own without stooping to Hannity’s level. Taylor calmly said, “The easy way out is the explosive way out.”
Hannity, still sounding like a belligerent bullyboy, asked, “Why do you want to appease evil?”
Taylor answered, “It’s not appeasement. It’s sensible diplomacy.”
So Hannity turned to the other guest, former Iranian hostage and retired Marine, Steve Kirtley. Note: It seems to be some kind of Hannity & Colmes rule that every night they have to have one of the 1979 hostages, just to make sure we hate the Iranians enough.
But Kirtley agreed with Taylor that talking to the Iranians is “sensible diplomacy.”
An obviously frustrated Hannity asked Taylor disdainfully, “What are you gonna say to the Holocaust denyer? … What great words of wisdom are you gonna bestow on him?”
Taylor remained unruffled. He said he’d be one of five or six people in a delegation. “That’s the only way a solution’s gonna come about.”