Hillary Clinton: "O.J. is Innocent!"

Hillary Clinton held a rally in South East Los Angeles yesterday in what many veteran political observers and several sources close to the campaign have labeled a “poorly-conceived,” “counterproductive,” “embarrassing,” and “condescending” effort to stop her steady slide in popularity within the African American community. One Democratic pollster not affiliated with the campaign described the event as “pandering taken to its most offensive extreme.”

That this was not campaign business as usual was clear from the instant that Clinton took to the stage. The candidate left her usual pant-suit in the closet in favor of what aides called a “more urban look,” composed of a baggy black Juicy Couture sweat-suit, gold lame bikini top, and an oversized clock pendant of the kind popularized by Flavor Flav of the rap group Public Enemy. Clinton also broke with her customary speaking style. Rather than address the crowd from the lectern or walk calmly among the audience, she strutted – and, at one point, made what appeared to have been an attempt at moonwalking – across the stage. It was a display that aides said had required many hours of practice and repeated viewing of hip hop videos between campaign stops.

Above: Rap icon and Clinton fashion hero Flavor Flav

“She may not have been super smooth out there,” a Clinton assistant admitted, “but you should have seen her when we started. Anyone who doubts her work ethic does not know Hillary Clinton. She’s come a long, long, long, long way. Believe me. Keep in mind that this is the same woman who just a few months ago allowed the public to pick a Celine Dion song as her campaign theme." (BBC)

Indeed, in the early stages of this campaign, it appeared that Clinton would be able to automatically count on the African American community for the same strong degree of support that was a mainstay of her husband’s back-to-back presidential victories in 1992 and 1996. Recent months, however, have seen a decided shift of opinion in favor of Barack Obama, Clinton’s only remaining Democratic rival and the son of a man born in Kenya. With race an increasingly prominent issue in the contest and with the Clinton campaign accused by some of making racially-tinged remarks, Ms. Clinton’s support among African Americans has continued to fall precipitously at the same time that her overall standing in the race has changed from front-runner to underdog.

While the style of her delivery may have changed, much of the substance of the candidate’s remarks was familiar. Ms. Clinton largely stuck to her standard stump speech but also made several rhetorical detours in what seemed to be an awkward endeavor to connect with her predominantly black audience.

“I get the African American community,” Ms. Clinton noted at an early point in her remarks. "Toni Morrison called my man Bill the first black president of this country. So I am a part of this community, if only by marriage. Word to your mother. Did I use that phrase correctly?”

When she reached the portion of her campaign speech in which she criticizes George Bush’s “War on Terror” and its effects on civil liberties, Ms. Clinton’s address took what may have been its weirdest turn.

“The holding of prisoners at Guantanamo without trial raises fundamental questions of justice. And that is something that this of all American communities should understand,” Senator Clinton said. “You remember what they did to O.J. as well as I do. He was clearly innocent. He did not kill his wife. Never. Not in a million years. George Bush is the world’s [counterpart to L.A.P.D. detective] Mark Fuhrman! You think that stunt with the glove was bad, just look at what George Bush did with that trumped up intelligence on Iraqi WMD! And, by the way, if elected President, I pledge to do all I can to help O.J. track down Nicole’s true killer.”

Many in the audience were too young to personally recall the O.J. Simpson episode and the racial tensions that it stirred up. Even those familiar with the incident -- in which retired professional football player O.J. Simpson was arrested, tried for, and found innocent of the 1998 murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her lover Ronald Goldman -- tended to find the thread of Senator Clinton's thoughts difficult to follow.

The Simpson trial was a major event in Los Angeles. Mr. Simpson’s celebrity attracted extensive media coverage from the very start, and the trial became the subject of a true media feeding frenzy after allegations of evidence tampering by the LAPD surfaced and gained credibility. The trial also became a source of rising racial tension. Opinion polls showed that while African Americans tended to agree with Mr. Simpson’s eventual acquittal by wide margins and to see him as the victim of a racist and corrupt police department, white Americans tended to believe equally strongly in Mr. Simpson’s guilt. Long after the trial’s conclusion, questions concerning Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence and the justice or injustice of his trial remain racially divisive and therefore largely taboo. At the center of much of the controversy lies a pair of gloves linked to the murders by DNA evidence. The prosecution case depended heavily on claims that the gloves had been found in Mr. Simpson’s possession while the defense alleged that they had been planted on the football player’s property by a racist police detective determined to frame Simpson for the murder of his wife.

Above: Simpson defense attorney Johnnie Cochran with the notorious gloves.

Ms. Clinton returned to the subject of the prisoners held in Guantanamo by a somewhat circuitous route. “As my good friend [and Simpson defense lawyer] Johnnie Cochran once said, 'If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.' Well, I say that the same thing goes for those held for years without trial in Cuba: if the prayer cap [of Islamic fundamentalism] does not fit, you must acquit. If the beard gets shaved, they must be saved. If they don’t care for camp X-Ray, they must not be made there to stay.”

By this point in her remarks, Senator Clinton had already provided ample evidence of a strong taste for self-debasement. Rather than risk leaving the stage with some of her dignity intact, she offered one more embarrassing couplet to a crowd apparently stunned into silence by the bizarreness of her rhetoric: “If they weren’t involved in attacking this country in a fit of Islamic rage, why must we keep them in that cage?”

Nearing the end of her speech, Ms. Clinton stated her intention to remain in the Democratic primary contest until its conclusion. She had just dropped rapper Chuck D’s name in connection with the classic track “Don’t call it a comeback,” when Secret Service agents hustled her off the stage and onto a waiting campaign bus. Security officials later explained that these protective measures had been prompted by the eruption of a melee in front of the stage. Sources indicate that the disorder may have been triggered by Senator Clinton’s inadvertent use of what many in the crowd took to be a hand-signal denoting membership in the L.A. Crips street gang.