Bill Clinton's recent comments to that VFW audience in North Carolina should be understood for what they were: a perfect example of the Clintons' now-polished technique of making veiled-but-legible racist comments and then disingenuously denying them,  even (diabolically disingenuous!) blaming the Obama campaign for the controversy.

Specifically, Clinton's "patriotism" comments were in fact another racist shout-out to White working class voters, and an attempt to lay at Obama's door the rotten fruits of all the Clinton's strenuous race-baiting. "Yes," Bill was saying, "it's distressing and downright unfair to Whites that all this unpleasant race stuff is dominating the headlines. Wouldn't it be great--I mean, NORMAL--if we had two candidates who could talk about the REAL issues--not this unpatriotic race stuff? Y'know, two WHITE candidates, McCain and Hillary--wouldn't that be great?"

So the fact that many White voters don't want to vote for a Black candidate--for exactly the web of historical reasons Obama forthrightly addressed in his speech on race--is fine, Clinton is saying. In fact, it's Obama's uncomfortable-making campaign that's the problem!

But of course it's not Obama who's raised race as an issue in the campaign. It's the Clintons. Obama has mostly run as a candidate who simply happens, in the American social lexicon, to be labeled as "Black." It was both Bill and Hill's race-baiting (Bill on Jesse Jackson in S. Carolina, Hillary's "I have no reason to believe he's a Muslim," etc.) that established the "race meme" as an independent factor in  the campaign.

So the Clintons race-bait, and then turn around and blame Obama for the nastiness, telling Whites it'd be the most natural thing in the world to vote against Obama because he's Black--patriotic, too.

Honestly, did Nixon,  Reagan, or either Bush stoop to any more venomous--if clever--race-mongering than that?