Discriminations

Hillary is catching flak, amplified by Drudge, for affecting a patronizing Southern accent when she spoke at the First Baptist Church in Selma on Sunday. (Judge for yourself; listen to a snippet of “Kentucky Fried Hillary” here.)

In her talk, in which she stopped just short of declaring herself the first black First Lady destined to be the second black President, she also described a bleak racial battleground that it’s hard for most of us to see. “In the last two presidential elections,” she intoned,

we have seen the right to vote tampered with, and outright denied to too many of our citizens, especially the poor and people of color. Not just in Florida, Ohio, and Maryland, but in state after state.... It is simply unconscionable that today young Americans are putting their lives at risk to protect democracy half a world away when here at home their precious right to vote is under siege.

If she really thinks the right to vote is “under siege” in this country, heaven help us when President Hillary has to confront a real battle.

My favorite example of her peculiar method of expression, however, came when she described — oddly, I thought — the Voting Rights Act as “the gift that keeps on giving.” Gift? From whom? To whom?

The Voting Rights Act gave more Americans from every corner of our nation the chance to live out their dreams. And it is the gift that keeps on giving. Today it is giving Senator Obama the chance to run for president of the United States. And by its logic and spirit, it is giving the same chance to Governor Bill Richardson, an Hispanic, and yes, it is giving me that chance, too.

Oh, now I get it. The Voting Rights Act, which barred racial discrimination in voting, was actually a gift to Hillary, or rather to the rest of us for somehow, inexplicably, giving us the opportunity to be led by Hillary. Lucky us.

Finally, if Hillary really wants to claim that the victims of “Bloody Sunday” were beaten by Alabama state troopers so that she could be liberated to run for president, the least she could do is spell the name of that hallowed ground, the Edmund Pettus bridge, correctly on her own “Hillary for President” web site. It is misspelled throughout the text of her speech as the “Pettis Bridge.”