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Hillary Clinton speaks at a National Newspaper Publishers Association event Wednesday in Washington, where she took pointed questions from the Black Press of America. (AP Photo)

Hillary Clinton is in a bind. As she struggles to make up the ground she’s lost to Barack Obama, some of her campaign officials say that whenever she attacks her Democratic opponent on issues like experience and leadership, he turns the tables by playing the race card.

One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told FOX News that the Clinton campaign has long been frustrated by her inability to make policy attacks stick to Obama. The source said the campaign has at times come out more damaged after going on offense than it was before.

One instance came when Bill Clinton called Obama’s anti-war positions a “fairy tale.” Clinton was subsequently decried for racial attacks, but many Clinton supporters said the former president’s comment was taken out of context and deliberately misinterpreted through a race-based lens.

Another came when Hillary Clinton said that Lyndon Johnson was critical to getting civil rights legislation passed in the Sixties, and she was then decried for not giving enough credit to Martin Luther King.

Nonetheless, Clinton is continuing to do as she has vowed: ignore no constituency.

When it comes to courting black voters, Clinton was at the State of the Black Union in New Orleans late last month, even after Obama won Louisiana 57 to 36 percent in the Feb. 9 primary.

Clinton also attended a Black Press of America event Wednesday night in Washington, D.C., where she said that regardless of the primary battle, both Democratic candidates are better representatives for the African-American population than John McCain.

“I have a lot of supporters who voted for me in very large numbers. I would expect them to support Senator Obama if he were the nominee,” Clinton said. “I think the Democratic Party will see that whatever differences Senator Obama and I might have had during the primary campaign, they pale to our differences with Senator McCain and the Republican Party, and that is a case we will be making with a very universal voice.”

The Clinton campaign officially denies that it is doing anything differently now in regard to race, though it has reined in Bill Clinton after his comments about South Carolina going for Obama just as it once went for Jesse Jackson.

Hillary Clinton repeated Wednesday night that her campaign has had a standing request for surrogates and staff to stay respectful. It has taken action against former advisers and staff who have violated that request, including New Hampshire co-chairman Bill Shaheen, who raised questions about Obama’s past drug use, and Iowa staffers who forwarded an e-mail claiming Obama is a secret Muslim.

Still, the Clinton campaign appears to have been taken by surprise as black voters have overwhelmingly abandoned the New York senator. Exit polling from Mississippi showed Obama won 91 percent of the black vote in that state. He has done nearly as well in many others.

It wasn’t always this way. A survey of 750 likely black primary voters taken by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in October and November found that Clinton still polled well among the blacks.

Of those surveyed, 51 percent viewed Clinton very favorably, compared with the 40 percent who viewed Obama the same way.

“[Obama's] campaign and his candidacy from the very beginning has been based more on white votes than black votes,” said David Bositis, a senior political analyst who studies the roles of race in politics at the Joint Center.

He said Clinton alienated a lot of black voters, who then shifted to Obama, with the campaign’s racially charged comments. He said the “fairy tale” remark was pushed and viewed more as a “metaphor” for Obama’s campaign.

Bositis said Clinton would be hard-pressed to find a state where the black vote is still up for grabs. In states she has won, like Ohio, she benefited from middle-class white voters and the support of the political establishment. In New York and New Jersey, she benefited from a home-court advantage.

Townhall.com contributor Matt Lewis, a conservative, said he is interested to watch the Democratic Party fall apart over race.

He said that while Clinton’s campaign has spoken about racial matters, “the difference is Barack Obama is sort of egging them on. He’s playing the race card because he benefits by this.”

Lewis argued that Obama tried to keep alive the issue of Geraldine Ferraro, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate and Clinton campaign finance committee member who resigned from her role in the campaign on Wednesday after she said Obama was “lucky” that America is captivated by the idea of electing a black president.

“The problem is he has claimed to be a new kind of politician,” Lewis said. “His sort of selling point was that he wanted to move past the issues of the ’70s and ’60s that we’ve been fighting for generations. …

If he really wanted to move past those issues, he would just move on. He kept the Ferraro thing going, and actually this is sort of a pattern that we’ve seen. They’re playing the game.”

Not so, said former Georgia Republican Senate candidate and radio talk show host Herman Cain.

“All Obama has done is responded to the race card,” he said.

Cain said Ferraro wasn’t intending to be racist, “but it was racial. If you are black in America you have to respond. He didn’t bring it up, Geraldine Ferraro did. And the Clinton campaign, this isn’t the first time. I don’t think it was inspired by the campaign necessarily, but this is another example of the race card being played.”

Cain noted that analysts predicted that if Clinton fell behind in delegate votes after Super Tuesday, her campaign would try to use race: “She fell behind in delegate votes after Super Tuesday. Two days later, (Clinton supporter) Ed Rendell, governor of Pennsylvania, played the race card the first time.”

But even as Clinton publicly refuses to concede any constituency, she may have to privately write off the black vote during primary season and then find a way to win it back for the general election, if she wins the nomination.

Clinton spokesman Mo Elleithee said the campaign is confident “voters in the general election will know about Senator Clinton’s long history of fighting for equal opportunity for the African-American community.”

Against McCain, it’s no contest, he argued.

But Bositis said going into the general election without making peace with black voters in the primary is a big risk. Though black voters are unlikely to vote in large numbers for McCain, “some would in fact stay home, others would maybe vote for Cynthia McKinney or one of the other third-party candidates,” he said.

“It’s not like it’s going to be easy for her to make this up,” he said.

Ironically, he noted that Clinton strategist Mark Penn said Thursday that Obama can’t win a general election without winning big states like Pennsylvania.

Bositis added: “But a Democrat can’t win in those states (in November) without a big black vote.”

FOX News’ Aaron Bruns and Judson Berger contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Top Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.