Courting the Fox Viewer Vote

As a conservative, I never dreamed I'd ever find myself writing something positive about Sen. Clinton, but I've got to say I'm very happy to see that she's finally tailoring her message to appeal to the average Fox Viewer.

The most recent example of this occurred on Monday, when she told the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that Barack Obama should dump his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. It was a very savvy move on her part. In just a single sentence, she was able to negate all the nuance and detail in Obama's "Race and Politics" speech and reduce the issue to it's most understandable form: "black men are scary."

She ignored Obama's explanation that the pastor was wrong, but that he loved him like a member of his family and understood the bitterness someone who lived through Jim Crow might feel and, instead, used the incident to stoke our fears about black people.

Hell, it didn't even matter to her that Wright is retired and no longer actually Obama's Pastor. She saw an opportunity to tie Obama to a lingering fear of violent black revolt and jumped at it. It was an act that can only be described as O'Reillian in its divisive beauty.

And let's not forget why she's demanding that Obama dump his former pastor. He said, "God Damn America," while preaching about the injustices committed against himself personally, and black people, generally, by his government and his fellow citizens. To many of us, that was a crime greater than the discrimination and injustices themselves. Indeed, last week, Wolf Blitzer noted that those words caused pain for many Americans, and he was right. I felt that pain as acutely as Rev, Wright felt his own when he was denied housing, accommodations, employment, and even the right to complain when he was called "boy."

"God Damn America." I think many of us have heard it before in other contexts. A pro-life rally isn't really a pro-life rally unless it's uttered at least a half a dozen times. But that's different. It's not black people reacting to a lifetime of indignities.

And Sen. Clinton knows that. She knows that the average Fox viewer doesn't give a damn about nuance. She knows that the average Fox viewer doesn't have an ounce of compassion when it comes to the historical, and to a lesser extent, current, treatment of blacks in our society. More importantly, she knows that many whites perceive blacks as being a dangerous, subversive element in our society, and she's exploiting the hell out of it.