The Great White Hope emerges…

Hillary Clinton is now the Bernie Epton of the 2008 presidential campaign.

In 1983, when Harold Washington stunned Chicago by defeating Jane Byrne (then mayor of Chicago) and Richard M. Daley (now mayor) to win the Democratic mayoral primary, all eyes turned to Bernard Epton, a political non-entity whom the Republicans put up to run against the Democratic nominee. For decades, the Democratic primary was tantamount to the mayoral election, but when an African American won the nomination, the wildly irrational fears of whites fixed on Bernie Epton as The Great White Hope who would save them from the black peril.

In 2008, it is difficult to imagine the hysteria that gripped Chicago back in 1983, but there were many white Chicagoans who talked openly about moving out of the city if Washington were elected. Epton, running with the slogan ”Before it’s too late,” came within 3.3% of defeating the Democratic nominee. But in the end, the support of Latinos and white ‘Lakefront Liberals’ as well as a united African American community elected Harold Washington the first African American of the great city of Chicago. And despite the ‘Council Wars’ between the black mayor and the white-dominated City Council, whites did not move out of Chicago and the city was able to absorb the lessons of the hysteria that had gripped the city in 1983.

In an interview with USA Today on Wednesday, Hilary Clinton cited an Associated Press story that “found how Senator 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.”

Is Hillary trying to suggest that people of color are not ‘hard-working’? Or that ‘white Americans’ who support Obama are indolent elitists? Certainly, there will be many African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color who will have to wonder whether the junior senator form New York is trying to play to stereotypes and prejudices — still held by many ‘white Americans’ — that they are lazy.

“I can’t believe Sen. Clinton would say anything that dumb,” Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan) told The New York Daily News. The criticism from Rangel is significant, because it was Rangel — a dominant figure in Harlem politics — who first encouraged Hillary to run for the senate seat in New York being vacated by the retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

“So why would these Democrats refuse to vote for a nominee running on Democratic principles against a self-described conservative Republican?,” asks Eugene Robinson. “The answer, which Clinton implies but doesn’t quite come out and say, is that Obama is black — and that white people who are not wealthy are irredeemably racist,” writes the African American columnist in his column in today’s Washington Post. “The other notion — that Clinton could position herself as some kind of Great White Hope and still expect African American voters to give her their enthusiastic support in the fall — is just nuts.”

Hillary’s racially coded speech was so obviously egregious that even the New York Times to her to task. “…Mrs. Clinton will be making a terrible mistake — for herself, her party and for the nation — if she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with disturbing racial undertones,” the Times editorial board declared.

“Yes, there is a pattern — a familiar and unpleasant one,” the New York Times editorial board continued. “It is up to Mrs. Clinton to change it if she hopes to have any shot at winning the nomination or preserving her integrity and her influence if she loses.” And this from the paper that had endorsed Hillary in the run-up to the New York primary in February.

In the New York Times obituary of Bernie Epton, an Illinois Republican colleague was quoted as denying that Epton was a racist and saying that ”He’ll be remembered for the wrong things.” Hillary Clinton is now risking the possibility that she’ll be remembered for running a racially divisive campaign against the man who would go on to become first African American president of the United States.