Joe Conason raps Hillary for her stupid hard-working, white people crack. But then comes the obligatory "not a racist" defense:
The tragedy is that neither Clinton carries even the slightest racial animus, as their many African-American friends and colleagues would testify, no doubt. Bill Clinton's first and most dedicated political adversary in Arkansas was "Justice Jim" Johnson, a Klan-backed Democrat turned Republican who was that state's version of Wallace. The Clintons spent years working to defeat Johnson and everything he represented, and he repaid them with years of plotting, scheming and smearing as a cog in the Arkansas Project. He hated them, first and foremost, because they represented the Democratic Party's rejection of white supremacy in the South. As governor, it was Bill Clinton who erased the last vestiges of Jim Crow from the Arkansas Constitution.
So the Clintons probably understand the essential evil of racism better than most white politicians. They have certainly done more than most of today's white politicians to combat that evil. That is why, as they contemplate the conclusion of this campaign, they deserve better from themselves than to encourage doubt about their decency and character.
Dog, we don't care whether you have any "racial animus" or whether you "understand the essential evil of racism." If you're willing to feed the fears of those who have "racial animus," how are you any better? Indeed, Intentionally playing into racist stereotypes--which you know not to be true--is arguably WORSE than actually believing them. At least the believer is being honest, and perhaps, can be talked off the ledge. What Conason is proferring is an immoral "knowledge without responsibility" standard, in which those who knowingly stoke and benefit from evil are somehow morally superior to those who blindly do evil. Dude, to paraphrase Anthony Lane, break me a fucking give.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Wow, you didn't even need a hammer to hit that nail on the head.
Isn't this the argument always extended to GWB (and Reagan, and, if you are being really generous, Nixon), that they weren't personally racist?
Except that, at the end of the day, who gives a damn about how they live their personal lives? What matters is how they comport themselves in the public arena, and the verdict on all three is pretty damn sad.
Give Conason credit - I'd never before encountered the "some of THEIR best friends are black..." variant on the "some of MY best friends are black...." defense. A defense I might point out is routinely used by Ann Coulter, pretty much everybody at the National Review (that Thomas Sowell is one popular guy), most Republican politicians, etc...
Apparently its just peachy to appeal to racism as long as you had dinner with some black dude last week.
I think Conason was trying to say that it was a total accident. Clinton wasn't willing to play on racist fears, her comment was made without any real contemplation of race issues. It was an innocent - in every sense of the word - gaffe.
Do I agree with Conason? I'd certainly like to. I hope Clinton wasn't willing to win the nomination through appeals to racism.
But hell, I don't know. She stuck by her support for the war well into 2005. She was a Senator from one of the most anti-war states. It's hard for me to believe that she didn't make a political calculation that cost thousands of lives. If she's capable of that, she may very well have been capable of racist appeals in the primary.
That said... the standard you invoke above could easily be applied to Barack Obama. Barack Obama gave a tremendous speech about race - for white people. Go back and look at the text. How many times did he point to specific racial grievances that exist today? 13% of black men can't vote, about a million black men working for (and I use this term intentionally) slave wages in our prisons, gross disparities in school funding, etc. etc. etc.
And Obama is going to act like racism is dead? That it impacted Wright's generation but not his own?
I dunno. We used to have honest conversations about race. Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Martin Luther King Jr., Eldridge Cleaver... They spoke inconvenient truths.
Today, we've got a nearly invisible Jesse Jackson and a similarly marginalized Reverend Al Sharpton. Hell, even Julian Bond is lying low as a University professor.
One caveat: Barack Obama may be downplaying the race card because he needs to subordinate immediate truths to the larger good of attaining a position in which he can affect needed change. I think that'd be a fair defense that would differentiate him from Hillary Clinton.
But everything else I wrote about the lack of leadership and frank discussion re: race issues... well, that stands.