From the Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace:
—On the Black Vote—
JUAN WILLIAMS: It is the case that I think that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton surrogates have racialized this campaign, and they’ve made Barack Obama into the black candidate. That’s what Mara is talking about going forward.
The question is if you look at, for example, you know, Latino voters, Jewish voters, especially in the big states, and of course, white voters in general, how are they going to react to Barack Obama now that he’s no longer seeking to transcend race? . . .
BILL KRISTOL: He is seeking to transcend race. . . . This is totally unfair to him.
WILLIAMS: This is not unfair. He is seeking to transcend — and what he did last night was he went back to the uplift message and transcending race. But when he was in South Carolina . . . [h]e played for the first time as a black candidate to a black constituency. That’s what happened in South Carolina.
KRISTOL: That’s just unfair. [Obama] was resolute in not playing that card. Now, the Clintons tried to make him that. What’s he supposed to do, say I’m not black or something like that? . . . He has run the most race-blind campaign of any candidate, black or white, in modern times.
WILLIAMS: I think he’s exceeded expectations. . . . But you have to understand that in South Carolina, a place where he was being posited as not black enough, where the senior black politicians were either standing on the sidelines or literally taking walking-around money from the Hillary Clinton campaign, he had to establish himself as a black person.
That’s why he put his face on those posters. In Iowa, there was no black face on the posters. . . .
—On the Hispanic Vote—
WALLACE: Mara, I want to get back to the point you made, saying that what the Clintons did may have helped Obama and backfired in South Carolina, but might help them going forward. . . . Explain that. Why could this strategy of making this a more racially polarized race help them on Super Tuesday?
MARA LIASSON: I think that Super Tuesday is a wide variety of states. Now, in some southern states where there are big black populations in the Democratic primary electorate, like South Carolina, I think that Barack Obama’s going to do very well.
But in states where there are big Hispanic populations, I think the Clintons feel — even their own Hispanic pollster, Sergio Bendixen, has said it’s just a historical fact that Hispanic voters haven’t shown an affinity for voting for black candidates. I think they’re counting on that. . . .






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