Playing the victim in elitist fashion

The New York Times' Matt Bai tries to make sense of the Clinton camp's uncanny ability to play the victim after continually smearing Barack Obama.

What's most confounding about this latest turn into ugliness, though, is the Clintons' remarkable capacity to cast themselves as the victims in every fight. And so here is Hillary Rodham Clinton accusing Barack Obama of somehow injecting race into the campaign, because she found herself in a world of trouble for her own comments about Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson. Now, I really do think she was intending only to make a sensible point about the value of experience in the White House, but look, the Clintons embody the generation that invented identity politics and political correctness. If Mrs. Clinton couldn't guess at how that comment was going to land in the black community, then she must have been suffering amnesia.

What's even more surprising to me is how Clinton's comments about LBJ being the prime mover behind granting African Americans their civil rights haven't produced a similar backlash in the progressive community as it did in the black community. There's no doubt that Lyndon Johnson was courageous when he passed the Civil Rights Act, but Clinton's comments don't only downplay the role of Martin Luther King Jr., but all the "ordinary people" - both black and white - that risked their lives to make America's supposed commitment to equality a reality.

What Clinton's comment shows more than anything is her belief in elite politics at the expense of people power.