I'm recycling some related comments I made on other reader blogs with some additional content, because I realized they were related, had a guilty sense of having thread-jacked a little with each of them, and, finally, that what I said about Wright in one comment compelled me, in all honesty, to cut Gerry Ferraro a tiny slice of slack.

Let's start with Rev. Wright.

The the same logic that says Obama must reject and denounce Rev. Wright requires millions of people in the South, and indeed, throughout the nation, both black and white, to reject and renounce their grandparents and never enter their homes again. At least, that's apparently what they have to do to hold public office.

Obama should have tried to change Wright? A thirty or forty odd year old congregating trying to change the views of a man that age? How utterly presumptuous and futile that would have been. Obama should have found another church where there was no chance that, on occasion, the pastor would let loose with some cringe-inducing rant of anachronistic brimstone? How utterly pointless, and yes, I dare say wrong, that would have been.

In a brutally funny routine (aren't they all?) Chris Rock observed that the most prejudiced people in the world were old black men, the reason being that they grew up when "having the white man on your back" meant having a the white man on your back. Forget not getting a taxi, they were the taxi -- and here he pantomimed a man jumping onto another's back cracking the whip and shouting "heeyah, giddyup boy!" Younger black men recognize this, make allowances for it and take the bad with the good. Just like we white people do with our own elders.

Both of my grandfathers, long dead, were about as racist as they could be. They were also both possessed of much wisdom. Even as a small child, I knew one from the other and made allowances for the times they grew up in. My father was as broadminded as a man of his age and class in the South could be expected to be, but the attitudes that made him something of a racial progressive in the 60s made him more than a bit bigoted by the time he died. It wasn't his attitudes that changed, it was the times. I didn't try to change him, and I didn't reject and renounce him. I loved him, honored him for having been as progressive as he was when it counted, despite his age and upbringing, learned what he had to teach me, and made allowances for what could not be changed.

This is exactly what Obama was alluding to when this Wright clip was raised before, and what I hope he (tactfully) sends out the same message again: our old people grew up in a harsher, uglier time and much of that ugliness is permanently etched into their souls. Many have achieved far more change within themselves than we could ever have believed possible had we lived in their times. We take the good that they all have to offer and let the bad pass by knowing with certainty that it will die with them, soon enough.

If there was any basis for believing that this sermon was typical rather than exceptional (other the fact that a bunch of outragemongering Fox News thugs say so), it would be different, just as there's a difference between an old Methodist pastor who occasionally says something cringe-inducing about homosexuality and Fred Phelps screaming "God hates fags!" every Sunday. One is a fallible human being being a human being, the other is a psychotic being monstrous.

And, in this respect, I have wronged Gerry Ferraro. She is old, she grew up in the same 'hood as Archie Bunker. I should have made allowances for that.

But I did not wrong her by much. She's a public figure—one who is duly impressed with her own place in history—talking to the media, first local, then national, not some preacher talking to his flock whose taped sermon was leaked to the enemy at Fox. Second, and I'll take this up in detail at the end, it is impossible for me to believe that this was not deliberate messaging by the Clinton campaign. It would not be the first time they sent out Gerry to speak that which the candidate dare not speak herself. They sent her out to pitch the “those mean men were ganging up on her at the debate” line to the single middle aged white women of New Hampshire when Hillary herself was saying the opposite and now, at this odd juncture where the demographics of Mississippi and Pennsylvania make it fortuitous, Gerry suddenly pops up to tell us that Obama would not be where he was today if he weren't black.

At one level, Ezra Klein is quite right about Ferraro's comments. The statement means little because it is nonsensical. If Obama wasn't black, he'd be somebody else with a whole other portfolio of experiences and accomplishments.

At another level, however, it is a far fouler, appeal to the prejudices of, say people in a state where the demographics trend white, blue collar and older than just about anywhere else in the nation, than anyone seems to have appreciated, one narrowly targeted to get them to apply their prejudices specifically to Obama.

Barack Obama is a staggeringly accomplished man. Merely to describe his accomplishments makes one sound like a drooling star-struck Kool Aid drinker with a Chris Matthews style man crush. Obama got his B.A. from Columbia, majoring in political science with an emphasis in international relations. He was a community organizer in his twenties who, among other things, was behind a remarkably successful voter registration drive in Chicago. He received his J.D. From Harvard Law, Magna Cum Laude. He was research assistant to Lawrence Tribe, who called him "the most all-around impressive student I had seen in decades." While working for Tribe “Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a Law Review article that Tribe wrote titled, 'The Curvature of Constitutional Space.'” In his third year, Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he eschewed the incredibly lucrative job offers that await presidents of the HLR, and, instead, went to work with a respected, but small and not very remunerative, civil rights firm in Chicago. He also taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago and, it is said, could have had been full professor any time he wanted, had he not chosen to also pursue a political career. He had a meteoric rise from state senator to U.S. Senator to Presidential candidate. He is the author, the actual author, not some pol claiming credit for the work of a ghost author, of of two best selling books. Both of his books are extremely well written, the first a remarkably insightful memoir, the latter a cogent synthesis of recent events and our political and economic history that lucidly explains where we are, how we got here and what we can do about it. Chock full of policy precriptions, wonky yet readable and remarkably self-reflective.

As a senator, he has sponsored some very serious signature pieces of legislation and gotten them passed while he was a member of the minority. And, oh yes, the guy happens to be the most outstanding political orator of his generation, and may be one of the four or five best in the history of the party. He has created and run a tight, well-run and remarkable harmonious campaign organization that has upended the carefully laid plans of the Mighty and Inevitable Hillary Clinton Machine and run up huge margins against her in, what, fifteen out of the last seventeen states now?

Was he fast tracked by the powers that be in the Illinois legislature and by the Democratic Senate leadership? You bet he was. That's what organizations do with prodigies. Businesses do it, universities do it, the military does it and, yes, they do it in politics.

And yet when you look at the comments of Hillary's supporters on this blog, over and over again, you see him dismissed as “an empty suit.” It is a central meme in Hillary's campaign now. Empty suit. Pretty speeches and no content. Just a vacuous, content-free pretty boy.

Do you really think anyone would buy that drivel if he were white? That's the subtext Gerry was pushing. “Accomplishments? C'mon, he's a moulie. Columbia? Affirmative action. Harvard? Quota baby. President of the Harvard Law Review? Just a bunch of northeastern liberals exorcising their white guilt. University of Chicago? Reverse racism. Illinois legislature? Blacks takin' care of their own. Senate? Affirmative action. You know how it is today. Those blacks get everything, and us whites get the short end, know what I'm sayin'?”

Which is why, in the end, Gerry gets no slack from me after all. She wasn't just some random old lady ranting the way old people do when the topic turns to race. She was on a mission. Which, in turn, is why Hillary deserved every last second of the caustic soda sandblasting Olbermann unleashed on her last night.

I've lived in the South, or the border South, my whole life and I'm old enough to remember the bad old days when white supremacy was mainstream political thought. I've lived through the days when racial politics transitioned from fire hoses and bullets and George Wallace screaming "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever" to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," Ronald Reagan's speechifying about "states rights" in Philedelphia, Mississippi and Jesse Helms "white hands" ad. (God, I'll never forget how utterly appalled I was by that ad and that whole campaign. In the waning days of the Bush I Administration, I thought the country was past that sort of thing. Now that was naïve.)

I'm a white guy, but I know the politics of racial dog whistling when I see it.

The racial dog whistle isn't directed to the people who have swastika tattoos and Klan robes in their closet. It is directed to the angry blue collar white guy who starts all his pronouncements with "I'm no racist, but . . ." and then goes on and on and on about "them" and how "they" act. People who know they're getting a raw deal and need a scapegoat. People who genuinely think it would be profoundly foul and offensive to call a black person "nigger" to his or her face but see nothing wrong with using the word in private conversations with other white people.

I've seen that tune oh-so-skillfully played in a wistful minor key by Jesse Helms and the other Republicans in North Carolina for more than two decades. Mostly, its all about a wink and a nod, a codeword here and a subtle image there and all to convey a simple message: "those blacks are privileged and getting special treatment and stealing your tax money and it just ain't fair.: And you quickly learn that when its time to get blunt and say something really foul, they always out a black man to say it for them.

The inevitable protestation of complete innocence is the most sickening part of the act. In every case, when someone calls bullshit, the candidate pulls his halo and his best wounded expression out of his desk and sorrowfully bemoans the way his opponent makes everything about race (but, you know, that's how those people are, idn't it? Everything always a racial thing with them).

Since Helms retired, those tactics have faded just a bit in North Carolina, but they're still alive and well when you get into Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama. And while the lyrics to the song are a little different in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Indiana, the tune is the same.

We know how this game is played down here and so do Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill and Hillary lived in Little Rock frakkin Arkansas throughout the 70s and 80s. Bill was growing up in Arkansas when the 101st Airborne stood between crowds of screaming white adults and five kids who had to have U.S. marshals escort them to every class. Bill and Hill are two of the finest political minds of their generation and avid specators of the game of politics.  They know all there is to know about that game because they've seen it played by experts for decades.

And that's the point. Knowing how that game is played, Hillary and Bill know exactly what you must avoid saying and doing if you don't want people, black and white, to think you are playing it too. If you know what not to say and what not to do to avoid that perception and then go ahead do it anyway, not once, not twice, but over and over again, it is impossible to avoid the inference that you know what you're doing and you are doing it deliberately. Sure, its an inference, but juries are allowed and encouraged to send people to jail, and even to die, on the basis of inferences of similarly quality and strength.

No one is accusing Hillary or Bill of being racists. No one thinks they are white supremacists or harbor any racial prejudice whatsoever.

No, what they are doing is much worse. They stand accused of coldly mobilizing the racial prejudices of white voters, prejudices which they do not share, as a means of getting votes from people whose views they hold in contempt.

No doubt they rationalize it by telling themselves about all the good things they'll do for black people after she wins.

And, worse, still, many of Hillary's supporters are blithely enabling the effort, either because they are blinded by the Kool Aid and applying the Reverse Clinton Rules ("no matter how blatant the activity, anyone who accuses Bill and Hillary of being ruthless and calculating is repeating Republican Talking Points") or because they are themselves the kind of people who are being targeted.

That's what Olbermann was was so upset about. This was her chance to say, “NO! We will not do this, even if it costs me the nomination” and she did not do it.

Keith was shocked, and appalled, furious and saddened.

I was merely furious, appalled and saddened.