Last week my guy was the Islamofascist candidate for the Democratic nomination. This week he is the affirmative action candidate. As Geraldine Ferraro has now famously put the case:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Clinton says she disagrees. According to Marc Ambinder, “Arlington Center aides say that Clinton does not feel as if she has to apologize for Ferraro’s comments; after all, they are Ferraro’s, not her own.” No more her own than say, Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic statements were her opponent’s?

I think the Clinton forces have inserted various wingnut issues into the campaign for the democratic nomination in a way that gives Clinton, herself, deniability, as a part of what has been termed the kitchen sink strategy. To be fair, some of this appears to be opportunistic, but it’s worth noting that Clinton’s disclaimers are pretty pale when they occur, pale enough to let the perpetrators off the hook. And the kitchen sink strategy started long before the most recent primaries, at least as far back as South Carolina when Bill Clinton campared Obama to Jesse Jackson.

If Obama is running a themed campaign with a clear goal, however idealistic, and it think it’s fair to say that he is, Clinton’s campaign has put the candidate, herself, at its center and seems bent on gaming the system at every turn in order to advance her cause. If some of the gaming is opportunistic, some of it is not. When you run a campaign that is primarily about yourself, you have to belittle your opponent.

The belittling strategy is called “let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world,” according to Ferraro. That’s code for “Let’s talk about the inferiority of Obama, who has nothing to offer the country but words.” The focus on language is telling because it attacks a part of Obama’s identity. It’s pretty easy for such a focus to drift into other areas: race, religion, attacks on Obama’s constituents as groupies or cultists, etc.

— or is it drifting?

P. S. Tim Burke has a great post about this today.