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Remember
when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th
grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed
the 8th grade in 1895?
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina
, Kansas , USA
. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey
Valley
Genealogical Society and Library in Salina
, KS
, and reprinted by the Salina
Journal.
8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina,
KS,
1895
Grammar (Time,
one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters. Name the parts of speech and define those that
have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and
paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of
a verb? Give principal parts of "lie", "play", and
"run."
5. Define case; illustrate each
case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules
for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of
about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of
the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 65 minutes)
1. Name and
define the fundamental rules of arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10
feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942
lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation
of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to car ry on a school seven months
at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal
at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for
8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12
inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for
90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square
farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a
Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the
epochs into which U.S.
History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery
of America
by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of
the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of
the United
States.
5. Tell what you can of the history
of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most
prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse,
Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the
following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following:
alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, and sy llabication.
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give
examples of each: trigraph, sub vocal, diphthong, cognate letters, and
lingual.
4. Give four substitutes for caret
'u.'
5. Give two rules for spelling
words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters
in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes
and use in connection with a word: bi-, dis-, mis-, pre-, semi-, post-,
non-, inter-, mono-, and sup-.
8. Mark diacritically and divide
into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound:
card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in
sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze,
raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently
mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by
syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the
extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what
use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North
America
5. Name and describe the following:
Monrovia ,
Odessa ,
Denver
, Manitoba ,
Hecla
, Yukon ,
St. Helena, Juan
Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco .
6. Name and locate the principal
trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of:
Europe
and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast
colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which
the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the
earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to
complete. Gives the saying "he only had an 8th grade education" a
whole new meaning, doesn't it?
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May 14, 2008
The New Cold War
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NY Times)
The next American president will inherit many foreign policy challenges, but
surely one of the biggest will be the cold war. Yes, the next president is
going to be a cold-war president - but this cold war is with Iran.
That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East
today - the struggle for
influence across the region, with America
and its Sunni Arab allies (and
Israel) versus Iran,
Syria and
their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.
As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, "In the
power
struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides:
Iran and the U.S."
For now, Team America
is losing on just about every front. How come? The
short answer is that Iran
is smart and ruthless, America
is dumb and weak,
and the Sunni Arab world is feckless and divided. Any other questions?
The outrage of the week is the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah attempt to take over
Lebanon.
Hezbollah thugs pushed into Sunni neighborhoods in West Beirut,
focusing particular attention on crushing progressive news outlets like
Future TV, so Hezbollah's propaganda machine could dominate the airwaves.
The Shiite militia Hezbollah emerged supposedly to protect Lebanon
from
Israel. Having
done that, it has now turned around and sold Lebanon
to Syria
and Iran.
All of this is part of what Ehud Yaari, one of Israel's
best Middle East
watchers, calls "Pax Iranica." In his April 28 column in The
Jerusalem
Report, Mr. Yaari pointed out the web of influence that Iran has built
around the Middle East - from the sway it has over Iraq's prime minister,
Nuri al-Maliki, to its ability to manipulate virtually all the Shiite
militias in Iraq, to its building up of Hezbollah into a force - with 40,000
rockets - that can control Lebanon and threaten Israel should it think of
striking Tehran, to its ability to strengthen Hamas in Gaza and block any
U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace.
"Simply put," noted Mr. Yaari, "Tehran has created a situation
in which
anyone who wants to attack its atomic facilities will have to take into
account that this will lead to bitter fighting" on the Lebanese,
Palestinian, Iraqi and Persian Gulf fronts. That is a sophisticated strategy
of deterrence.
The Bush team, by contrast, in eight years has managed to put America in the
unique position in the Middle East where it is "not liked, not feared
and
not respected," writes Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator
under
both Republican and Democratic administrations, in his provocative new book
on the peace process, titled "The Much Too Promised Land."
"We stumbled for eight years under Bill Clinton over how to make peace
in
the Middle East, and then we stumbled for eight years
under George Bush over
how to make war there," said Mr. Miller, and the result is "an America
that
is trapped in a region which it cannot fix and it cannot abandon."
Look at the last few months, he said: President Bush went to the Middle
East
in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went in February, Vice
President Dick Cheney went in March, the secretary of state went again in
April, and the president is there again this week. After all that, oil
prices are as high as ever and peace prospects as low as ever. As Mr. Miller
puts it, America
right now "cannot defeat, co-opt or contain" any of the key
players in the region.
The big debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is over whether or
not we should talk to Iran.
Obama is in favor; Clinton has
been against.
Alas, the right question for the next president isn't whether we talk or
don't
talk. It's whether we have leverage or don't have leverage.
When you have leverage, talk. When you don't have leverage, get some - by
creating economic, diplomatic or military incentives and pressures that the
other side finds too tempting or frightening to ignore. That is where the
Bush team has been so incompetent vis-à-vis Iran.
The only weaker party is the Sunni Arab world, which is either so drunk on
oil it thinks it can buy its way out of any Iranian challenge or is so
divided it can't make a fist to protect its own interests - or both.
We're not going to war with Iran,
nor should we. But it is sad to see
America and its
Arab friends so weak they can't prevent one of the last
corners of decency, pluralism and openness in the Arab world from being
snuffed out by Iran
and Syria.
The only thing that gives me succor is the
knowledge that anyone who has ever tried to dominate Lebanon
alone -
Maronites, Palestinians, Syrians, Israelis - has triggered a backlash and
failed.
"Lebanon
is not a place anyone can control without a consensus, without
bringing everybody in," said the Lebanese columnist Michael Young.
"Lebanon
has been a graveyard for people with grand projects." In the Middle
East, he
added, your enemies always seem to "find a way of joining together and
suddenly making things very difficult for you."
May 11, 2008
Is She a Trojan Rabbit?
By MAUREEN DOWD (NY Times)
WASHINGTON
Now Barack Obama faces a true dilemma: how best to punish Hillary Clinton.
After 15 months of fighting her off, as she veered wildly from bully to
victim, as she brandished any ice pick at hand, whether racial, sexual,
mathematical or marital (in the form of her Vesuvian husband), Obama must
decide the most efficacious means of doing to Hillary what she has been
trying to do to him: putting her in her place.
Her last resort is to continue to press the "Psssst - he's a black
man"
tactic. She insisted to USAToday, after the North Carolina and Indiana
slide, that she has a broader base, citing an Associated Press article
"that
found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans,
white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had
not completed college were supporting me."
So how does Obama repay Hillary for running a campaign designed both to
unman him and brand him as an unelectable black? Is the most ingenious way
to turn the screw by not choosing her as his running mate, or by choosing
her?
It is, verily, a sticky wicket.
One top Hillary supporter who is black warns that, despite the giddy dreams
of some punch-drunk Democrats, a fusion ticket could backfire because
"Americans can't handle too much change at once."
But should Obama ignore that caution and appease Hillary fans by putting her
on the ticket?
As president, he could announce that, because Dick Cheney abused the powers
of his office so grievously, taking the title "Vice" literally, he
intends
to shrink the vice presidency back to its "bucket of warm spit"
Constitutional prerogatives - presiding over the Senate and taking over if
the president goes under anesthesia.
He might also neglect to give Bill (whose acronym would be SLOTUS, Second
Lad of the United States)
full White House access.
Aside from the delight Bill would get from living at the Naval Observatory
and having a huge telescope to window-peep with, there wouldn't be much joy
in Hillaryland.
The lady-in-waiting would be surrounded by Obama disciples who disdained her
for fighting dirty. And she would be miserable holding up the train of the
young prince who usurped her dream, derailing the post-nup she had with Bill
to trade places.
As de facto veep for Bill, she had enough leverage over him, due to his
shenanigans, to co-opt huge chunks of policy and personnel decisions.
But in a return engagement with Obama at the top, could she really wake up
every day in the back seat and wish him well, or would she just be plotting?
(Fourteen vice presidents have ascended, after all.) Wouldn't she be, in
Monty Python parlance, the Trojan Rabbit behind the gates?
On a positive note, maybe she could bring back all that stuff she pilfered
on her way out.
Obama's other option, laid out by Teddy Kennedy on Friday, is to go with
someone who wouldn't be a big dark cloud over his sunshiny new politics.
Teddy told Bloomberg's Al Hunt that Obama should choose a partner "in
tune
with his appeal for the nobler aspirations of the American people."
That would be smart for another reason: Hillary has a strange, unnerving
effect on Obama, and whenever he is around her, he's unable to do his best.
Probably, it's because she's furious, always shaking his hand off her arm,
ignoring him, giving him the evil eye and emasculating him, and the Golden
One is not used to such rough treatment.
In the last few days, as Hillary has deflated and Obama and the Democrats
have dashed for daylight, he has been more like his old self, flashing his
all-is-right-with-the-world smile on the cover of Time, joshing and charming
Democrats and Republicans as he wooed superdelegates on the House floor,
taking on James Carville for insulting his manhood.
"James Carville is well known for spouting off his mouth without always
knowing what he's talking about," he told Terry Moran on
"Nightline."
Obama will never be at his best around Hillary; she drains him of his
magical powers. She's Jane Jinx to him. It's a similar syndrome to the one
Katharine Hepburn's star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in
"Pat
and Mike."
The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he's in the stands, her
tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy,
asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, "You are the
wrong jockey for this chick."
"You know, except when you're around, we got a very valuable piece of
property here," he says, later adding, "When you're around, she's
no good,
she's dead, see?"
The best way Obama can punish Hillary is to reward himself. He's no good
around her, see?
May 12, 2008
The Oil Nonbubble
By PAUL KRUGMAN (NY Times)
"The Oil Bubble: Set to Burst?" That was the headline of an October
2004
article in National Review, which argued that oil prices, then $50 a barrel,
would soon collapse.
Ten months later, oil was selling for $70 a barrel. "It's a huge
bubble,"
declared Steve Forbes, the publisher, who warned that the coming crash in
oil prices would make the popping of the technology bubble "look like a
picnic."
All through oil's five-year price surge, which has taken it from $25 a
barrel to last week's close above $125, there have been many voices
declaring that it's all a bubble, unsupported by the fundamentals of supply
and demand.
So here are two questions: Are speculators mainly, or even largely,
responsible for high oil prices? And if they aren't, why have so many
commentators insisted, year after year, that there's an oil bubble?
Now, speculators do sometimes push commodity prices far above the level
justified by fundamentals. But when that happens, there are telltale signs
that just aren't there in today's oil market.
Imagine what would happen if the oil market were humming along, with supply
and demand balanced at a price of $25 a barrel, and a bunch of speculators
came in and drove the price up to $100.
Even if this were purely a financial play on the part of the speculators, it
would have major consequences in the material world. Faced with higher
prices, drivers would cut back on their driving; homeowners would turn down
their thermostats; owners of marginal oil wells would put them back into
production.
As a result, the initial balance between supply and demand would be broken,
replaced with a situation in which supply exceeded demand. This excess
supply would, in turn, drive prices back down again - unless someone were
willing to buy up the excess and take it off the market.
The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then,
is if it leads to physical hoarding - an increase in private inventories of
black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of
disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.
But it hasn't happened this time: all through the period of the alleged
bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells
us that the rise in oil prices isn't the result of runaway speculation; it's
the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding
oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China.
The rise in oil
prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from
exceeding supply growth.
Saying that high-priced oil isn't a bubble doesn't mean that oil prices will
never decline. I wouldn't be shocked if a pullback in demand, driven by
delayed effects of high prices, sends the price of crude back below $100 for
a while. But it does mean that speculators aren't at the heart of the story.
Why, then, do we keep hearing assertions that they are?
Part of the answer may be the undoubted fact that many people are now
investing in oil futures - which feeds suspicion that speculators are
running the show, even though there's no good evidence that prices have
gotten out of line.
But there's also a political component.
Traditionally, denunciations of speculators come from the left of the
political spectrum. In the case of oil prices, however, the most vociferous
proponents of the view that it's all the speculators' fault have been
conservatives - people whom you wouldn't normally expect to see warning
about the nefarious activities of investment banks and hedge funds.
The explanation of this seeming paradox is that wishful thinking has trumped
pro-market ideology.
After all, a realistic view of what's happened over the past few years
suggests that we're heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil.
The consequences of that scarcity probably won't be apocalyptic: France
consumes only half as much oil per capita as America,
yet the last time I
looked, Paris wasn't a howling
wasteland. But the odds are that we're
looking at a future in which energy conservation becomes increasingly
important, in which many people may even - gasp - take public transit to
work.
I don't find that vision particularly abhorrent, but a lot of people,
especially on the right, do. And so they want to believe that if only
Goldman Sachs would stop having such a negative attitude, we'd quickly
return to the good old days of abundant oil.
Again, I wouldn't be shocked if oil prices dip in the near future - although
I also take seriously Goldman's recent warning that the price could go to
$200. But let's drop all the talk about an oil bubble.
May 11, 2008
Party Like It's 2008
By FRANK RICH (NY Times)
ANOTHER weekly do-or-die primary battle, another round of wildly predicted
"game changers" that collapsed in the locker room.
Hillary Clinton's attempt to impersonate a Nascar-lovin', gun-totin',
economist-bashin' populist went bust: Asked which candidate most "shares
your values," voters in both North Carolina and Indiana exit polls opted
instead for the elite and condescending arugula-eater. Bill Clinton's
small-town barnstorming tour, hailed as a revival of old-time Bubba
bonhomie, proved to be yet another sabotage of his wife, whipping up false
expectations for her disastrous showing in North
Carolina. Barack Obama's
final, undercaffeinated debate performance, not to mention the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright's attempted character assassination, failed to slow his inexorable
path to the Democratic nomination.
"It's still early," Mrs. Clinton said on Wednesday. Though it's way
too late
for her, she's half-right. We're only at the end of the beginning of this
extraordinary election year. While we wait out her self-immolating exit, it's
a good time to pause the 24/7 roller coaster for a second and get our
bearings. The reason that politicians and the press have gotten so much so
wrong is that we keep forgetting what year it is. Only if we reboot to 2008
will the long march to November start making sense.
This is not 1968, when the country was so divided over race and war that
cities and campuses exploded in violence. If you have any doubts, just look
(to take a recent example) at the restrained response by New Yorkers,
protestors included, to the acquittal of three police officers in the
50-bullet shooting death of an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.
This is not 1988, when a Democratic liberal from Massachusetts
of modest
political skills could be easily clobbered by racist ads and an incumbent
vice president running for the Gipper's third term. This is not the 1998
midterms, when the Teflon Clintons triumphed over impeachment. This is not
2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts
did for windsurfing what the
previous model did for tanks.
Almost every wrong prediction about this election cycle has come from those
trying to force the round peg of this year's campaign into the square holes
of past political wars. That's why race keeps being portrayed as dooming Mr.
Obama - surely Jeremiah Wright = Willie Horton! - no matter what the voters
say to the contrary. It's why the Beltway took on faith the Clinton
machine's
strategic, organization and fund-raising invincibility. It's why some
prognosticators still imagine that John McCain can spin the Iraq
fiasco to
his political advantage as Richard Nixon miraculously did Vietnam.
The year 2008 is far more complex - and exhilarating - than the old
templates would have us believe. Of course we're in pain. More voters think
the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the
history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush
is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.
And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page
will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all
the campaign's acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is
palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath
the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new
voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.
Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing
and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it.
Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest
political decision he's made (and, yes, he's made dumb ones too). The second
smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal
anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan,
dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don't know yet if he's the man who can make the
moment - and won't know unless he gets to the White House - but there's no
question that the moment has helped make the man.
For five years boomers have been asking, "Why are the kids not in the
streets screaming about the war the way we were?" The simple answer: no
draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in "Millennial
Makeover," their book about the post-1982 American generation, that
energy
has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social
networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials' bottom-up
digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political
organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama's camp knew how to work it.
The part of the press that can't tell the difference between Facebook and,
say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons'
vintage 1990s roster of
fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.
The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted,
still isn't fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio
through Tuesday's
primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white,
working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption,
lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats,
cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be
duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr.
Obama's reach.
Guess what: there are racists in America
and, yes, the occasional rubes
(even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana,
which hasn't
voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more
white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer
Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little
evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America,
let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.
As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama's
favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points
since last summer in the Times/CBS poll - a wash despite all the
hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs.
Clinton's
favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable
rating rose 17.) Gallup last week
found that after the Wright circus Mr.
Obama's white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than
John Kerry's against President Bush in 2004.
But this isn't 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the
Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters
and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the
electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio,
the crucial swing state that Mr.
Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted
for 18 percent of the state's Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent
in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap
of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted
for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio
voters even showed up
in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.
Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama,
it's even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to
the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting
can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can't surf to a right-wing
blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other
predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.
This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more
than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among
them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans)
unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting
against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in
Louisiana fell to a Democrat last
weekend, despite a campaign by his
opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.
A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last
week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that "his
manner
lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness - the
tempered steel beneath the sleek suits." John and Cindy McCain get it
too,
which is why both last week made a point (he on "The Daily Show,"
she on
"Today") of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain
keeps
his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas, he
can't
disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That's what's left of
his party's base.
Now that the Obama-Clinton race is over, the new Beltway narrative has it
that Mr. McCain, a likable "maverick" (who supported Mr. Bush in 95
percent
of his votes last year, according to Congressional Quarterly), might
override the war, the economy, Bush-loathing and the bankrupt Republican
brand to be competitive with Mr. Obama. Anything can happen in politics,
including real potential game changers, from Mr. McCain's still-unreleased
health records to new excavations of Mr. Obama's history in Chicago.
But as
long as the likely Democratic nominee keeps partying like it's 2008 while
everyone else refights the battles of yesteryear, he will continue to be
underestimated every step of the way.
May 10, 2008
Seeds of Destruction
By BOB HERBERT (NY Times)
The Clintons have never
understood how to exit the stage gracefully.
Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was
Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the
candidate favored by "hard-working Americans, white Americans," and
that her
opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can't cut it with that
crowd.
"There's a pattern emerging here," said Mrs. Clinton.
There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using
that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern
strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons,
in
their desperation to find some way - any way - back to the White House, have
leapt aboard that sorry train.
He can't win! Don't you understand? He's black! He's black!
The Clintons have been trying to
embed that gruesomely destructive message
in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It's
a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to
both Bill and Hillary over the years.
(Representative Charles Rangel of New York,
who is black and has been an
absolutely unwavering supporter of Senator Clinton's White House quest, told
The Daily News: "I can't believe Senator Clinton would say anything that
dumb.")
But it's an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class
voters. It's true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black
candidate under any circumstance. But the United
States is in a much better
place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and
many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in
people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using
now.
I don't know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to
deliberately convey the idea that most white people - or most working-class
white people - are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair
hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
The last time the Clintons had to
make a big exit was at the end of Bill
Clinton's second term as president - and they made a complete and utter hash
of that historic moment. Having survived the Monica Lewinsky ordeal, you
might have thought the Clintons
would be on their best behavior.
Instead, a huge scandal erupted when it became known that Mrs. Clinton's
brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied the president on behalf of
criminals who then received presidential pardons or a sentence commutation
from Mr. Clinton.
Tony Rodham helped get a pardon for a Tennessee
couple that had hired him as
a consultant and paid or loaned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over
the protests of the Justice Department, President Clinton pardoned the
couple, Edgar Allen Gregory Jr. and his wife, Vonna Jo, who had been
convicted of bank fraud in Alabama.
Hugh Rodham was paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon of Almon Glenn Braswell,
who had been convicted of mail fraud and perjury, and for the release from
prison of Carlos Vignali, a drug trafficker who was convicted and imprisoned
for conspiring to sell 800 pounds of cocaine. Sure enough, in his last hours
in office (when he issued a blizzard of pardons, many of them
controversial), President Clinton agreed to the pardon for Braswell and the
sentence commutation for Vignali.
Hugh Rodham reportedly returned the money after the scandal became public
and was an enormous political liability for the Clintons.
Both Clintons professed to be
ignorant of anything improper or untoward
regarding the pardons. Once, when asked specifically if she had talked with
a deputy White House counsel about pardons, Mrs. Clinton said: "People
would
hand me envelopes. I would just pass them on. You know, I would not have any
reason to look into them."
It wasn't just the pardons that sullied the Clintons'
exit from the White
House. They took furniture and rugs from the White House collection that had
to be returned. And they received $86,000 in gifts during the president's
last year in office, including clothing (a pantsuit, a leather jacket),
flatware, carpeting, and so on. In response to the outcry over that, they
decided to repay the value of the gifts.
So class is not a Clinton forte.
But it's one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to
deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party's likely
nominee - and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the
substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many
years.
The Clintons should be ashamed of
themselves. But they long ago proved to
the world that they have no shame.
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