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Obama's Campaign No 'Fairy Tale,' Bill Clinton Admits

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By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and SHAILAGH MURRAY, The Washington Post

Published: January 12, 2008

WASHINGTON - Former President Clinton worked Friday to smooth over comments from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign and its allies that have raised hackles in the black community, a week before Democrats will vote in the South Carolina primary, their first test involving a heavily black electorate.

The comments have come from Clinton, D-N.Y., and several of her most prominent surrogates, including New Hampshire ally Billy Shaheen, who made insinuations about Sen. Barack Obama's admission of past drug use, and Clinton's husband, Bill Clinton, who appeared to dismissively describe the campaign platform of hope and change offered by the strongest black presidential contender in history as the "biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."

Publicly, Obama's campaign has so far only echoed the concerns expressed by others, without directly accusing the Clintons of trying to inject race into their primary showdown.

Other Democrats have spoken out, however. "I think it was an unfortunate set of words that really set off a firestorm," said Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. The remarks by the former president, Brazile said, are particularly troubling.

"It struck us, coming from a president that has stood by and championed so many issues that African-Americans cared about - at first blush, it really did hit you the wrong way," Brazile said Friday night.

Bill Clinton spent much of the day trying to explain his remarks and regain the confidence of a community that historically has provided some of the Clintons' strongest support.

In a call-in interview on Al Sharpton's radio show, Clinton said he had meant only that Obama's statements about his position on the Iraq war are a "fairy tale," because Obama, D-Ill., had voted to fund the war upon arriving in the Senate after saying he opposed the invasion.

In a July 2004 interview with the New York Times, Obama said of the war vote: "What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made."

"I stand by what I said," Clinton said, but he continued: "I was addressing a specific argument that had never been brought up in the debates." He went on to say that, in 15 debates, Obama has never been asked to explain the comment saying he did not know how he would have voted had he actually been in the Senate for the war vote.

Obama otherwise consistently has said he would have opposed the war, as he did at the time, when he was running for the Senate.

"So, 'That story is a fairy tale' - now, that doesn't have anything to do with my respect for him as a person or as a political figure in this campaign," Clinton told Sharpton. "He's put together a great campaign. It's clearly not a fairy tale. It's real."

Acknowledging the closeness of the race after the first two nominating contests, Clinton also said: "I have given hundreds of speeches on Hillary's behalf in this campaign. I don't believe I've given a single one where I did not applaud Senator Obama and his candidacy. It's not a fairy tale: He might win."

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