By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2 

Charles Dickens understood the phenomenon: do-gooders who are impervious to the consequences of their actions. Mrs. Jellyby in Black House was one such lady; so concerned with her many charities that she neglected her own large family. It is thus sad, but not surprising, that the ugly face of racism has entered the U.S. presidential campaign, and by the hand of the Clintons.

It began during the New Hampshire primary. Bill Clinton claimed Senator Barak Obama was perpetuating "a fairly tale". The allusion was sufficiently ambiguous Clinton style ("it depends on what the meaning of "is" is" as he famously said during the Monica Lewinsky affair) to allow some wriggle room afterwards: He was, Clinton said, not referring to the aspiration for change that Obama so clearly represents for many democratic voters, but to Obama's claim to have been consistent in his opposition to the Iraq war. Then Mrs. Clinton weighed and again left wriggle room to subsequently deny the implication of her words: "Hope" was not enough, she said. Martin Luther King had required a President, Lyndon Johnson, to make his "dream" a reality in the voting rights act of 1965.

It got much nastier thereafter. Robert L. Johnson, introducing Mrs. Clinton to a black audience in the critical primary State of South Carolina, where half the democratic voters are black, and where Obama has surged ahead of Clinton in the polls, implied that the multiracial Obama, who has a white mother and an African father, was not black enough. Mr. Johnson, a long time Clinton crony, is the billionaire founder of the Black Entertainment Network, often called "the black exploitation" network, and much criticized for its violent soaps and misanthropic rap culture. Mr. Johnson said in effect that while Mrs. Clinton was out doing good for blacks, Obama had been snorting cocaine on Chicago's south side. Taken to task for these innuendos he responded "We've always said we need a perfect, well spoken, Harvard educated black candidate who would prove we've transcended race". These comments, needless to say, were not intended as a compliment. With Democrats like the Clintons and their surrogates, who needs Republican enemies.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.