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By Douglas Turner - BUFFALO NEWS REPORTER
Among the Clintons' most dedicated enemies, Dick Morris probably knows more about them than anyone. A bitter conservative, Morris was brought into the Clinton White House briefly in the mid 1990s to advise on how to triangulate Republican congressional power. Last Jan. 9, Morris said on a Fox News show: "As surely as Bill used the race card by attacking rap singer Sister Souljah in 1992, Hillary will use race to win in 2008." Most ignored Morris' remark because of his hatred of the Clintons, and the awkwardness of the "Sister Souljah" example. Sister Souljah had made a number of frightening, anti-white remarks. Then-Gov. Clinton denounced the extremist to show blue-collar Americans he was a centrist. It hardly marked Clinton as a man playing "the race card" in 1992, as Morris charged. But 16 years later, and hungry to return to power, Clinton got borderline ugly after his wife was beaten two-to-one in South Carolina by an African-American senator from Illinois, and with former Sen. John Edwards still in the game.

The Rev. "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here," Clinton said, patronizingly, three weeks after Morris' forecast.

Sen. Barack Obama had wobbled the Clintons by taking Iowa, and here he was bubbling after South Carolina as a trans-racial Ivy League teacher of constitutional law, an unsullied media darling.

The Clinton campaign downplayed Bubba's remark as something careless, or even rogue. Yet black political leaders grew edgy because the former president was not known for saying things he did not calculate.

Jackson was old news. Though still honored by many, Jackson had been bruised over a sex scandal by checkout-counter tabloids. Clinton's unflattering comparison of Obama to Jackson came before the campaign became irretrievably racial in mid-March when Fox began recycling excerpts of the hateful sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Obama's pastor for 20 years.

Last week, Obama seemingly shook off his Wright albatross, crushing Hillary Clinton in North Carolina, and almost beating her in Indiana.

The results renewed calls for her to get out of the race.

Sen. Clinton reacted.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA Today. As evidence, she cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

The big state primaries are as gone as the Clintons' campaign money. Remaining are medium-sized states like West Virginia, 3.2 percent black; Kentucky, 7.5 percent black; and Oregon, 1.6 percent black.

Clinton said "white" twice. Other words would have worked, but not as the powerful signal she felt she desperately needed to send to these overwhelmingly white states. The interview removed the last doubts that what Bill said after South Carolina wasn't carefully crafted.

The anger in the black community is palpable.

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said, "I am very concerned if we keep talking as if it doesn't matter that Obama gets 92 percent of the black vote -- since he only got 35 percent of the white vote, he's in trouble. That's like saying that 92 percent, they don't matter."

Even if Clinton crafts two miracles now, and is nominated and elected, what good will it do if 40 million Americans worry that she thinks they don't matter? If she loses, what of her usefulness in the Senate?