When asked about his 'moderation' of the last Presidential Debate - the infamous Gotcha Debate - George Stephanopoulos quite clearly averred (in an interview with Michael Calderone, here) that:
"We asked tough but appropriate questions," Stephanopoulos told me by phone this afternoon. When I asked whether questions about flag pins or Bosnia are actually relevant to voters, he replied: "Absolutely." "The vote for the president," Stephanopoulos said, "is one of the most personal" decisions that someone makes. "When people make that choice, they take into account how candidates stand on the issues," he said, but also are concerned with "experience, character [and] credibility."
It doesn't matter if we win; those people are shit. How would you like to be a worthless white ni***r?
Senator Clinton is in a very poor position. She has two choices.
One, she can try Obama's high road; first taken in the Wright matter when he addressed the building issue of the Reverend with his truly amazing speech on race. Unfortunately for her, she is nowhere near the communicator that Obama is. And her endless calls to 'denounce and reject' everything in sight that might possibly be of advantage to her have kind of taken away the believability of such a stance.
Or, her other choice would be to immediately fire Kantor from her campaign, and in some crushing fashion 'denounce and reject' James Carville and George Stephanopoulos for their silent complicity in Kantor's foul statements. But to do so would be a tacit admission of the truth of the video now circulating the tubz, and an admission therefore of how valuable her long association with these men has been to her.
If Clinton, and her surrogates, had not zeroed in on a campaign designed around the kind of endless gotcha politics we've seen this cycle - if she had taken the high road that Obama has mostly kept to, and entered into an honest and thoughtful debate with the junior Senator from Illinois - this wouldn't be much of an issue, I don't believe.
But the Kantor video - and its blowback - is the fruit that her campaign, her style of politics, and her life itself has borne.
Kantor is done, no matter what. Carville could switch to the Republican Party. And there is no woodshed for Georgie boy anymore - he could easily lose his job and his career for his quiet complicity in Kantor's invective.
If there is Karma on this earth, Clinton is also done. I don't see how she recovers, given even a quarter of the 'Death by a Thousand News Cycles' that Obama's been put through.
Bless the internet - there's still four days until Indiana and North Carolina.
Plenty of time.