Last week or so, we've heard about the Clinton campaign readying a "nuclear" option to use against Barack Obama. The author of the article at Huffington Post and similar other articles around the political watercooler all suggested that "the option" would center around a Clinton-framed "electability" problem that would convince super delegates from breaking to Obama. They hinted it might come in some "October surprise" that needed to be revealed right away, to prevent the party from making a terrible mistake in electing (notice I didn't say "awarding" or "handing") Obama as the party's nominee. They hinted it would be some terrible smear, another guilt-by-association "scandal" that would leave us all breathlessly heart-broken.

We misread the signs.

The "nuclear option" the Clinton campaign is employing is the Race Bomb. To wrest the nomination out of the hands of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton is willing to strap herself to the Race Bomb and ride it all the way. (Sadly, it seems that "all the way," is unilateral self-destruction. If it means "totally obliterating" the Democratic Party, well that is the price she is willing to pay. 

Now in truth, the Clintons have been testing this "weapon of mass destruction" throughout the campaign. Sometimes stealthily: casual, sly allusions to stereotypes about black people made by low-level surrogates like Billy Shaheen before Iowa and New Hampshire. (Did Barack Obama ever sell drugs?, he mused.) Sometimes it was delivered in the coded and twisted and superficial: surrogate former Sen. (and New School president) Bob Kerrey waxing poetic about how wonderful that Barack's middle name is Hussein and how great he was educated in a madrassa, or could he be the Manchurian Candidate?. (Of course we know none of that is true. But it added to the notion of being different -- not "white" enough.) 

Come Nevada and South Carolina, and the campaign was ready for more extensive testing: Bill and surrogate Robert Johnson among others dropping smaller, less potent versions to see how they work. ("Good" was the report: it galvanized that core of white voters who needed a reason to go with their guts and vote against the black man. The downside is that it also galvanized the black vote for Obama.)

Since Super Tuesday, the Clintons made a strategic -- not tactical, but strategic -- decision to stop competing for the black voters that propelled Bill Clinton in to White House (in a three-way race). They made the motions for a time (sending Bill to black churches) until opting to stop diluting the message they were sending to white voters. Geralding Ferraro went even further, deliver the now infamous "lucky to be black" storyline.

At each step, the anti-black message grew more and more apparent (if only we had really been wanting to believe what our lying eyes were telling us): Hillary on Barack as closet Muslim ("as far as I know") to the Rev. Wright controversy. Let us pause and examine that (once more briefly):

Although frantic posters had been clogging the blogworld for months with messages about "Obama's racist church" and such, the MSM didn't pick up on the storyline (it had been effectively beaten down by lib-blogs) until paid Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal gave it big play in his emails to influential news organs (ABC) and blogs like TPM and Politico. Now we have the newly "marginalized" "black" candidate with an "angry, scary, lunatic, unpatriotic" black "revolutionary" minister with "connections" to Louis Farrakhan (remember how Clinton had forced Obama to "reject and denounce" Farrakhan (another scary, angry, revolutionary black man) during one of the myriad debates?) and thrown in for good measure one of those white, long-haired radicals (with associations to other '60s radicals like the Black Panthers), all designed to raise the prickly little hairs on the red necks of those "hard working Americans, white Americans."

Rev. Wright (a medium-sized bomb) did not derail Obama. With the math working decidedly against her, and after the trouncing  she took in North Carolina and the razor thin win in Indiana -- a state she fully believed she would win handily (and not by coming from behind as she claims) -- it was time to go all the way.

Message testing proved the Race bomb could work; it had been effective in small doses elsewhere. With the black vote solidly in Obama's corner, she has nothing more to lose there. There is no "October surprise" in Obama's background. (Rezko trial is over. Nothing there. Wright-gate over, nothing more there. "Bitter-gate" over. (In fact, Clinton is banking on those very people and describing them in even more negative terms.)) 

In politics there are many things described as the "third rail." Social security, taxes, war, healthcare and of course, race. Clinton's decision to grab hold and not let go -- to take it to a level not seen since the days of George Wallace running for President is striking. It appears to be her decision to blow herself up in the process of deploying her nuclear option.

Which leads us to the question: What does Hillary gain? In her mind, the answer is only framed as "What does Obama not gain?" Early in this primary season, a number "anonymous" sources spoke of the conversations held inside Clinton's Arlington headquarters. Much of that discussion was about the "audacity" of Obama to think he could "steal" Hillary's turn to be President. Real dislike of him developed and festered. In recent days, that dislike has bubbled to the surface in Brazile/Begala fight televised on CNN.

Hillary must now feel the only way to stop Obama is arming, launching and dropping the Race Bomb. She's gone nuclear.