Two elected Democrats took the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday celebration on January 16 to give race-baiting speeches before black audiences.  One did it because he is stupid.  The other did it because she thinks blacks are stupid.  Both dishonored the memory of King, who had a dream that “all God’s children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.”

In New Orleans, outside City Hall, Mayor Ray Nagin called for “black people … to come together.  It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans ... a majority African American city.”

Nagin further commented that “It’s the way God wants it to be.  You can’t have New Orleans no other way.”  While he was in the process of reading the Almighty’s mind, he added, “Surely God is mad at America.  He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it’s destroyed and put stress on this country.”  And he added, “Surely he doesn’t approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses.  But surely he is upset at black America also.  We’re not taking care of ourselves.”

Mayor Nagin quickly realized that his comments were both stupid and racially offensive.  He apologized for them by the end of the week.  Not so with the other example of “chocolate” thinking.

At the Martin Luther King Day celebration held at Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network in New York, Sen. Hillary Clinton launched into an impassioned attack on the Bush administration.  “We have a culture of corruption, we have cronyism, we have incompetence.  I predict to you that this administration will go down on history as one of the worst that has ever governed out country.”  (Apparently, she was asleep during the Clinton administrations in Little Rock and Washington.)

But the most notice for her speech came from this comment, made to pander to her dominantly black audience: She said, “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation and you know what I'm talking about..."

For starters, the House has 435 Members, which makes it a mob, rather than a deliberative body.  If anything, the Republicans have been less draconian in running the House since 1994, than the Democrats were, the previous 40 years.  So, even without the playing of the race card, her statement was factually false, and she knew it.  But it wasn’t her point to be accurate.

Hillary Clinton, like Ray Nagin, believes that black voters are too stupid to see through their lies.  Now the mayor makes false statements because he, too, is dumb.  That is not true of the senator.  She knows exactly what she is doing.

Unless Rudy Guilliani comes in to run against her, Clinton’s reelection campaign as senator from New York will be a cakewalk.  But, she’s looking beyond that.  She’s looking at running for president in 2008.  She’s done the math.  She probably has a lock on the Democrat nomination, if she chooses to take it.  But she has no chance of winning the general election and being elected president, unless African-American voters turn out in droves, and vote for her in the 90% range, as they did for her husband.

But more and more black voters are listening to more and more black academics, social leaders, and elected officials who are telling them they’ve been had by the Democrats.  That they have been counted on, taken advantage of, and ill-served by the Democrats.

Hillary Clinton knows she needs to yank the chain, crack the whip, get those black voters back in line before 2008.  And she has calculated that race-baiting, rather than discussions of what is good for the black community, is the way to go.  After all, she could not focus on a critical subject like schools, since the Democrats (and the national and state “edukashun” associations) have continued the ever more expensive dumbing down of American public schools.  And those most hurt by that are black parents and their children.

So, Hillary being a smart woman, chooses race baiting as her tactic.  And unlike Mayor Nagin, she has zero intention of apologizing for her words.  Even though the purpose of these two politicians is the same – trick black voters into supporting me again – their “chocolate” minds are quite different.

He made his remarks by accident, and has apologized.   She made hers on purpose, and will never apologize.  He is merely a buffoon, who may not be reelected.  She is a threat to the safety of the nation.