Hillary Clinton: Racial Demagogue

By Matthew Vadum

Hoping to keep Obama-generated racial animosity alive long enough to get her past the presidential finish line in 2016, Hillary Clinton has been bloviating about what racist election laws America supposedly has.

“In 2013, so far, more than 80 bills restricting voting rights have been introduced in 31 states,” Clinton told fawning admirers at a meeting of the American Bar Association. Such laws are part of a Jim Crow-like effort to “disproportionately impact African-Americans, Latino and young voters,” she said.

Hillary, of course, is a seasoned race-monger who knows when to pour it on thick.

This is the person who patronizingly stretched her syllables out in a slow drawl when she last ran for the presidency. “I don’t feel noways tired,” she said, quoting a hymn by the late Rev. James Cleveland.

Race-baiting and racial pandering have always been part of Hillary’s oeuvre. She was close to ACORN just as her husband was when he was president and Arkansas governor. She spoke at ACORN conferences and played up her ties to the group.

Speaking at ACORN’s 2006 national convention, Mrs. Clinton looked back fondly on her memories of the group’s early days in Arkansas. It was a love fest. After noting that she founded a group called Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families that dealt with many of the same issues ACORN focused on, she hailed ACORN as a group of vision. “I thank you for being part of that great movement, that progressive tradition that has rolled across our country.”

Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Clinton said, “Let’s move it forward, let’s be drum majors for justice.”

More recently, Mrs. Clinton falsely claimed that the Supreme Court was in on the supposedly racist plot because it had “struck at the heart” of the Voting Rights Act this summer in a ruling denounced by left-wingers and the misinformed.

In fact all the high court did was strike down an obsolete formula in the Voting Rights Act that gave the race-baiting ballot box stuffers of the Left a distinct advantage in federal elections. The rest of the statute remains in effect and the Department of Justice still has the legal right to ask a court to order that state and local election operations be federally monitored.

To boil it down, the court opinion in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, was a pronouncement by the highest court in the land that America is not the racist swamp of leftist myth. The court acknowledged at long last that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which gave the federal government a veto over changes in state election laws in places with a history of discrimination, may have been needed when the law was enacted 48 years ago, but no longer.

Congress approved the statute months after the nation witnessed Alabama state troopers attacking civil rights marchers in Selma in March 1965. Lawmakers reasoned it was needed because many state and local officials routinely discriminated against black Americans in the voting process, making it difficult for them to cast their ballots.

But the recent court ruling recognized that widespread voting discrimination is a distant memory. Today black Americans fully participate in the democratic process by voting, running for, and winning elective office at every level of government up to and including the highest office in the land.

This is bad news for the race industry which thrives on making mountains out of molehills. Leftist demagogues and community organizers across the fruited plain are now howling that a key tool they used to frustrate electoral integrity efforts has been taken away.

Outside of MSNBC hosts, Hillary is probably the most high profile of the complainers.

“Now not every obstacle is related to race but anyone who says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention,” she declared.

Of course racial discrimination still exists somewhere out there, but it’s not much of a factor in modern American life.

As the Wall Street Journal opines, Mrs. Clinton “must have missed the May 2013 Census Bureau study on ‘The Diversifying Electorate—Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012 (and Other Recent Elections).’”

That government report showed that minority voter turnout nationwide has been surging in recent years. Black Americans, for example, had a voter turnout rate of just 53 percent in 1996. But black turnout has gone up in each of the last four presidential elections.

“In 2012, black turnout as a share of all eligible voters exceeded the turnout of non-Hispanic white voters—66.2% to 64.1%. Nearly five million more African-Americans voted in 2012 (17.8 million) than voted in 2000 (12.9 million). In both 2008 and 2012, black voters even exceeded their share of the eligible black voting age population. In 2012, blacks made up 12.5% of the eligible electorate but 13.4% of those voting.”

The big jump in black turnout since the days when left-wingers depicted Bill Clinton as the nation’s “first black president” undermines Hillary’s claim that new race-based obstacles to voting are on the upswing.

She claims that North Carolina’s new electoral integrity law “reads like the greatest hits of voter suppression.” All the legislation does is require the presentation of voter ID, shave a week off early voting, end same-day registration, and prevent the arbitrary extension of voting hours.

“Voters without an ID can get one free at the Department of Motor Vehicles and they can also cast a provisional ballot pending confirmation that they are legally registered,” the newspaper notes. The paper’s editorial adds that even though Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee have “some of the strictest voter ID laws of the more than 30 states that have such laws,” black turnout blew past that of non-Hispanic whites in 2012 in all three. states. “Where is the evidence that voter ID laws keep minorities from voting?”

Hillary seems convinced that feeding fears about make-believe government racism will get her back into the White House.

This Saul Alinsky disciple, whose senior college thesis was an ode to the master community organizer, is well aware that Democrats are going all-out to make her the nation’s first female president.

The primary purpose of the Benghazi cover-up was to help get Barack Obama reelected but the only slightly less important secondary purpose has always been to protect Mrs. Clinton as she runs for president.

Hillary may be even more thin-skinned than Obama. Look at her angry outburst during congressional hearings about the Benghazi attack in response to questions posed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.).

Displaying her signature callous indifference, she made it clear she didn’t care why Americans died on Sept. 11, 2012. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” she shouted. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

And remember this is the woman who is credited with the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy,” which she uttered on national television in order to distract from her husband’s storied “bimbo eruptions,” itself a term coined by Betsey Wright, a senior Bill Clinton campaign aide.

Hillary will do whatever it takes to become America’s 45th president.

If that entails trying to make Americans of different races hate each other, she’ll do it.

Brace yourselves for three and a half years of this, America.