Here is a link to the article in the NY Times about Burns Strider whom I mentioned in my last post.  Burns Strider is described as  "Senior Adviser and Director of Faith-Based Operations" in Clinton's campaign.

campaign.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/us/politics/03strider.html?ex=1367553600&en=cb0e05f037968dc5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

And I don’t think there is anything wrong per se in reaching out to particular religious groups.  And I do think it’s fine to point out common links between a campaign and the Christian right, for instance, in order  to point out that we all have concerns in common.  But when you use tactics which imply that you are a candidate OF the Christian right, or the extreme right in general, you've crossed a line. 

And this seems to me to be what's going on with the Clinton Campaign. Strider sounds like an instrument in the Clintons' use of innuendo and subtext and code language, another trick they have picked up all too well from the Karl Rove playbook.

Here's what Strider said at a campaign stop with Bill Clinton in a small town in North Carolina:

“It can be fun and informing or it can be painful when those core, foundational, defining beliefs and ways of seeing things enter into competition. Fortunately, faith and patriotism are generally two forces that pull us all together. Place us in communion as Americans. Their power, though, is also felt during those times when historical and cultural trauma uses them as agents that divide.”

I read this around the same time that I read this post in TPM which picked up a Bill Clinton quote from the AP.  Bill was also talking in small-town North Carolina:

"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."

And it seems to me that it makes Strider another tool in the Clinton campaign of “triangulating” if you will with the religious/rural right in a way that hasn’t anything to do with  issues of health care or global warming or Iraq, but has everything to do with using the religion, race, and good-ole-boy cards.  To me, this is at least as condescending as using the word “bitter”, and a whole lot more cynical.  I’d expect it from a Bush, but not from someone running in the Democratic primary.