Senator Barack Obama got mired in the controversy over his former pastor. Senator Hillary Clinton got bogged down on her comments about dodging dangerous fire in Bosnia. And both of them took political hits that lasted a while and did some damage.
Now, Clinton is clearly — and truly — bogged down in her comments about white voters liking her more than Obama, even though her aides now insist that she regrets the comments.

The damage to Clinton’s image seems profound. And what better evidence of THAT then the once-unimaginable development that one of her most ardent African-American supporters Rep. Charles Rangle would bluntly denounce her remark?

One of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most important supporters, Charles Rangel, repudiated her claims she has broader support among “white Americans,” calling the comments “the dumbest thing she could ever have said.”

The Harlem congressman’s criticism of Clinton came as rival Barack Obama Saturday took the lead among superdelegates, the group that will decide the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Speaking to reporters before introducing Clinton at a Manhattan fundraiser Saturday, Rangel chastised the remarks as “very poorly worded.”

But the barrage doesn’t end just there. On newspaper op-ed pages from the U.S. to Great Britain Clinton is being denounced, usually on several key points: (a) her comments make her a more polarizing figure than ever, (b) her comments are unlikely to help her achieve her goals of winning the nomination and unifying the party and (c) her comments damage the Clinton’s legacy of good ties with black voters — a legacy already greatly strained by some of Bill Clinton’s race-raising comments.

A look at some of articles and recent columns indicates that if getting “good ink” and “good air time” is a goal, the Clinton campaign has been derailed even more than the 2000 original version of Republican Senator John McCain’s Straight Talk Express. Here’s a sampling:

Andrew Sullivan, who has been highly critical of Clinton, writes one of his most critical columns yet for Times Online. A few excerpts:

From the very beginning, the premise and the promise of Barack Obama’s campaign was that it would transcend race. And last autumn the Obama team also knew this was the only way it could win.

The Clinton brand among black voters was so strong, so unbreakable, so resilient a force that even the first credible black candidate for the presidency remained stuck 20-30% behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters. She was, after all, the wife of the “first black president”, as the author Toni Morrison called Bill.

She had almost all the black political establishment behind her. Her husband, from his days in Arkansas during the civil rights movement, had forged a deep, durable bond with black America. And Obama’s only hope as a young insurgent was in winning a surprise victory in Iowa or New Hampshire, where black votes were close to nonexistent.

Sullivan is correct: if you go back and look at the stories at the time, Obama had PROBLEMS winning black votes. He then recounts the many instances where the Clinton campaign began to use code words and raise the race issue.

Last Thursday, Senator Clinton – dazed from a brutal setback in last Tuesday’s primaries – went even further. She told USA Today to consult 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”.

Yes: a candidate was explicitly arguing that she was the candidate of white Americans. No Republican would be so crude, certainly not John McCain. And that became her primary rationale for carrying on. After North Carolina, the short-term electoral costs have evaporated: West Virginia has a black population of just 3.3%, Kentucky has 7.5%, Oregon has 1.9%, Montana and South Dakota both have less than 1%. There are no black superdelegates willing to switch from Obama to Clinton at this point.

It would certainly explain why such bluntness — unheard of for a major political candidate — surfaced (even blunter was Clinton supporter Paul Begala’s comment earlier that the Democrats can’t with with just the support of “African Americans and eggheads…”).

And so a strategy that was essentially telling superdelegates that a black man could not win the general election became Hillary’s last resort. In this, the Clintons were egged on by the less principled members of the Republican right.

Black Americans – skilled at judging when they are being dissed – got the message. In last Tuesday’s North Carolina primary, Clinton got only 7% of the black vote – a lower percentage than Nixon or Reagan had won in general elections. If someone had told me last year that a Clinton would get less than 10% of the black vote in a Democratic primary, I would have asked what they were smoking. But in a few months, the Clintons have turned a 30-point lead among African-Americans into a deficit of more than 80 points. No constituency has swung as much over the past few months. And the black turnout last Tuesday was massive.

And, indeed, such a swift and near total loss of a constituency is not unusual in any political race.

A bit more from Sullivan:

In the Clintons’ morphing into a crude version of racially angry Reagan Democrats, you can see an almost Shakespearian tragedy. Bill Clinton has a long and admirable record in civil rights; and was on the right side of the struggle in the South in his youth. He has an effortless rapport with black Americans, and they were his core final constituency of support in the darkest days of impeachment.

…But he never ran against a black candidate and neither did his wife. They are used to loving and supporting minorities – as long as the minorities know their place and see the Clintons as the instrument of their salvation. Obama broke that dependency and that relationship. And that was why the Clintons had to do all they could to destroy and belittle and besmirch him.

But in that venture the Clintons are destroying themselves and their legacy and their capacity to bridge the very gaps they now must widen to stay in the race. It is a Clinton tragedy – and one that most Americans seem slowly, cautiously but palpably determined not to make their own.

Is that an unusually angry column?

The Milwaukee Journal’s editorial page didn’t sound much happier:

Hillary Clinton just said she would be the best Democratic presidential nominee because Barack Obama is black.

She and others likely will disagree with that conclusion, but it’s difficult to read her comments this week to USA Today any other way.

….Such rich irony. The charge long has been that the GOP has been the party employing the so-called Southern strategy, which supposedly depends on tapping white disgruntlement with those minority-favoring Democrats. Here, however, we have a major Democratic contender employing the same strategy.

Neither Clinton nor anyone else can say how blue-collar white Democrats will vote in November. It makes little sense to suppose that these Democrats, trying to weather an economic storm occurring during a GOP president’s watch, will look at a candidate who promises to be a change agent and see only a black man whom they should fear.

We’ll opt for the most charitable conclusion about Clinton here. If ever there was any doubt, she is now officially a candidate who will do anything and say anything to win - including playing hardball racial politics.

Joe Conason has often been blasted by some progressives as being sympathetic to Clinton. Not this time:

As long as Hillary Clinton is willing to spend the money and energy needed to continue her campaign, she certainly can ignore the pundits who insist that the Democratic nominating contest is over. What she should not ignore, however, is the damage that her increasingly reckless behavior is inflicting on her reputation and that of her husband — especially when she starts to sound like a reincarnation of the late George Wallace.

…..The tragedy is that neither Clinton carries even the slightest racial animus, as their many African-American friends and colleagues would testify, no doubt. Bill Clinton’s first and most dedicated political adversary in Arkansas was “Justice Jim” Johnson, a Klan-backed Democrat turned Republican who was that state’s version of Wallace. The Clintons spent years working to defeat Johnson and everything he represented, and he repaid them with years of plotting, scheming and smearing as a cog in the Arkansas Project. He hated them, first and foremost, because they represented the Democratic Party’s rejection of white supremacy in the South. As governor, it was Bill Clinton who erased the last vestiges of Jim Crow from the Arkansas Constitution.

So the Clintons probably understand the essential evil of racism better than most white politicians. They have certainly done more than most of today’s white politicians to combat that evil. That is why, as they contemplate the conclusion of this campaign, they deserve better from themselves than to encourage doubt about their decency and character.

The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:

From the beginning, Hillary Clinton has campaigned as if the Democratic nomination were hers by divine right. That’s why she is falling short — and that’s why she should be persuaded to quit now, rather than later, before her majestic sense of entitlement splits the party along racial lines.

If that sounds harsh, look at the argument she made Wednesday, in an interview with USA Today, as to why she should be the nominee instead of Barack Obama. She cited an Associated Press article “that found how Senator Obama’s support . . . among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.”

As a statement of fact, that’s debatable at best. As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama, it’s a slap in the face to the party’s most loyal constituency — African Americans — and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here’s what she’s really saying to party leaders: There’s no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you’ll be sorry.

How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America.

He analyzes the argument about white voters in great detail but has a different take on it (read it in its entirety), then he writes:

Clinton’s sin isn’t racism, it’s arrogance. From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has refused to consider the possibility that Obama’s success was more than a fad. This was supposed to be Clinton’s year, and if Obama was winning primaries, there had to be some reason that had nothing to do with merit. It was because he was black, or because he had better slogans, or because he was a better public speaker, or because he was the media’s darling. This new business about white voters is just the latest story the Clinton campaign is telling itself about the usurper named Obama.

“It’s still early,” Clinton said Wednesday, vowing to fight on. At some level, she seems to believe the nomination is hers. Somebody had better tell her the truth before she burns the house down.

Even the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a Republican, seems to be looking aghast:

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn’t say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.”

If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is — well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

“She has unleashed the gates of hell,” a longtime party leader told me. “She’s saying, ‘He’s not one of us.’”

She is trying to take Obama down in a new way, but also within a new context. In the past he was just the competitor. She could say, “All’s fair.” But now he’s the competitor who is going to be the nominee of his party. And she is still trying to do him in. And the party is watching.

Again: amazing.

Who can save the situation? The superdelegates.

You know them. They’re the ones hiding under the rock, behind the boulder, and at the bar.

They are terrified, most of them. They want the problem to go away. They want it handled, but they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to tell Hillary to stop, because they would likely pay a price for it, and not just with her.

But are all these denunciations being fair to Clinton?

Slate’s John Dickerson says no:

I don’t interpret Clinton’s latest remarks that way. Instead, I see Sen. Clinton trapped in an unforgiving episode of Iron Chef. Time is almost up, and she’s got to make a meal out of the spare ingredients left. She’s in too much of a rush to check if those mushrooms are poisonous. She grabbed the AP story listing the demographic groups that she is winning and ran down the list just as pundits have been doing for months.

Maybe I’m naive. Or maybe I think you have to have a little more proof before you claim someone’s a cynical race-baiter. Exhaustion and desperation seem a more likely explanation for Clinton’s dancing close to the white-vote land mine than more devilish motives. As Barack Obama has wisely said, we should give our exhausted candidates a break. (Of course, Clinton didn’t give him a quarter when he bungled his characterization of people who live in small towns.)

As campaign veteran Joe Trippi explained to me months ago, the survival instinct that takes hold at the bitter end is not necessarily unique to the Clintons. After months and months of fighting, no one wants to give up. With no perspective or time for fear, you grab the weaponry at hand and keep fighting. So Clinton is arguing she’s going to count Puerto Rican votes to show she’s won the popular vote—even though Puerto Ricans can’t participate in the general election. She’ll whip off a PowerPoint presentation to show how she’s won conservative districts. Everything will be pressed into service given the desperate state of things.

Then he offers this reason for his belief — which is a convincing one, at that:

Perhaps the best reason it seems likely Clinton wasn’t intentionally playing the race card is that she knows it would kill her chances at convincing superdelegates to back her. Roughly 250 of them are still staring out their windows in a rapturous state of ponder, thumbing Hamlet, and not making up their minds. Clinton has to somehow convince roughly 70 percent of them to support her. At the moment, they’re heading in the other direction as quickly as these risk-averse party-types can go. Obama has won 80 percent of the more than 130 or so superdelegates that have picked a candidate since Super Tuesday. Since the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, he has raked in 14 to Clinton’s three.

Clinton’s chances are so narrow and flickering as to be almost nonexistent, but of those superdelegates with whom she might still have a chance, sensitivity to race and its potential to divide the party is a big issue. It may be the issue, according to some of her aides. The more Clinton appears to have benefited by playing the race card or benefiting from racism that exists but she didn’t foment, the harder it will be for superdelegates to support her. At a personal level, they won’t want to look like they are ratifying her racial politics or the racist behavior of white voters. They also know that if they don’t choose Obama, and his supporters think race was the reason he didn’t get the nomination, those voters will be lost to the party for the general election. Not only will blacks stay home, but liberals and the first-time voters Obama has attracted will do the same, disgusted with party fat cats sanctioning what they’ll view as racist behavior.

Dickerson further concludes that Clinton may now be past the point where she can make her best case.

And, indeed, if THIS is her best case, she is past her point since it’s clear the reaction has been toxic: Obama supporters, joined by some folks who aren’t necessarily Obama supporters but whose jaws are agape at her comments, are facing off a loyal group of Clinton supporters who in their loyalty increasingly resemble the unshakable loyalty of George Bush’s most loyal supporters.

There is a hidden danger for Clinton in all of this, in terms of imagery.

It could be argued (and as you can see it is) that Clinton decided not to just telegraph her message about white voters but do it in a way that it was delivered in a sonic boom so voters in the remaining states pick up her belief that she is the one who is one of them in terms of being a blue collar worker kindred spirit (and they all happen to be white).

Now what will happen is that when Clinton wins the West Virginia primary, she and her side will point to the whopping margin as an enormous victory that proves her wide-spread appeal.

But the fact that this issue was raised in the manner in which it was raised, and sparked such widespread condemnation (when Charlie Rangel feels he has to distance himself from Clinton on this and diss her she REALLY knows she stirred things up) will diminish it’s impact.

Some Democrats and pundits will say: sure she won big, but she did it playing the race card.

Fairly or unfairly, that’ll be what will be implied — or said.

And it will likely decrease the impact of any win there on uncommitted Superdelegates — who increasingly seem to be getting out from hiding under the rock, behind the boulder, and at the bar….and are steadily endorsing Barack Obama.