The One opines:

“[OBAMA] We’ve got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country. We’ve got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding. … This country wants to move beyond these kinds of things.”

Well sir, if you want what the country wants, then you wouldn’t be smearing the Clintons as racist, you mealy-mouthed moralizing toxic fraudster. Sean Wilentz has the timeline and the exhaustive details:

A review of what actually happened shows that the charges that the Clintons played the “race card” were not simply false; they were deliberately manufactured by the Obama camp and trumpeted by a credulous and/or compliant press corps in order to strip away her once formidable majority among black voters and to outrage affluent, college-educated white liberals as well as college students. The Clinton campaign, in fact, has not racialized the campaign, and never had any reason to do so. Rather the Obama campaign and its supporters, well-prepared to play the “race-baiter card” before the primaries began, launched it with a vengeance when Obama ran into dire straits after his losses in New Hampshire and Nevada—and thereby created a campaign myth that has turned into an incontrovertible truth among political pundits, reporters, and various Obama supporters. This development is the latest sad commentary on the malign power of the press, hyping its own favorites and tearing down those it dislikes, to create pseudo-scandals of the sort that hounded Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. It is also a commentary on how race can make American politics go haywire. Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama’s supposedly uplifting campaign.

[In NH,] the last minute (as sometimes happens in statewide primaries), there was a sudden movement among the voters, this time toward Clinton. Many ascribed it to an appearance by Clinton in a Portsmouth coffee shop on the eve of the vote, where, with emotion, she spoke from the heart about why she is running for president. Others said that misogyny directed at Clinton on the campaign trail as well as on cable television and the Internet turned off women voters. The uprising was certainly sudden: As late as 6 p.m. on primary day, Clinton staff members with whom I spoke were saying that they would consider a loss by ten percentage points or less as a kind of moral victory. But instead, Clinton won outright, amazing her own delighted supporters and galling the Obama campaign.

That evening, the Democratic campaign became truly tangled up in racial politics—directly and forcefully introduced by the pro-Obama forces. In order to explain away the shocking loss, Obama backers vigorously spread the claim that the so-called Bradley Effect had kicked in. First used to account for the surprising defeat of Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley in the California gubernatorial race in 1982, the Bradley Effect supposedly takes hold when white voters tell opinion pollsters that they plan to vote for a black candidate but instead, driven by racial fears, pull the lever for a white candidate. Senior Clinton campaign officials later told me that reporters contacted them saying that the Obama camp was pushing them very hard to spin Clinton’s victory as the latest Bradley Effect result. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, a cheerleading advocate for Obama, went on television to suggest the Bradley Effect explained the New Hampshire outcome, then backed off—only then to write a column, “Echoes of Tom Bradley,” in which he claimed he could not be sure but that, nevertheless, “embarrassed pollsters and pundits had better be vigilant for signs that the Bradley effect, unseen in recent years, has crept back.”

In fact, the Bradley Effect claims were utterly bogus, as anyone with an elementary command of voting results could tell. If the “effect” has actually occurred, Obama’s final voting figures would have been substantially lower than his figures in the pre-election polls, as racially motivated voters turned away. Later, Bill Schneider, the respected analyst on CNN, several times went through the data on air to demonstrate conclusively that there was no such Bradley Effect in New Hampshire. But even on primary night, it was clear that Obama’s total—36.4%—was virtually identical to what the polls over the previous three weeks had predicted he would receive. Clinton won because late-deciding voters—and especially college-educated women in their twenties—broke for her by a huge majority. Yet the echoes of charges about the Bradley Effect—which blamed Obama’s loss on white racism and mendacity—lingered among Obama’s supporters.

And on and on and on. Fake from top to bottom, fake from beginning to end, fake all the way through, fake including the whole fake Muslim garb controversy (as Kevin Drum points out).

I guess, as far as Rovian tactics go, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.

Fake, fake, fake.

Or, I suppose, in honor of Philadelphia, where Obama is to give Teh Greatest Speech Evah, Phake.

NOTE Put down your coffee before you read this from the Times. Oh, now Obama wants to have a “conversation.” Reminds me of Bush, who always wanted to appear nice after putting a boot in your ribs:

Some associates advised him against giving the speech. “Race is now officially on the table. It’s not going away after this,” a senior aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, recalled one adviser saying.

Shit. Read, if you haven’t, Wilentz. It’s crystal clear who put race on the table, and when, how, and why they did it. Clue: It’s the same people who are now promoting Teh Greatest Speech Evah.