You have to hand it to the Clintons. The damage they've done to Barack Obama by injecting race into the campaign is perversely brilliant. Evil -- but, perversely brilliant.

Here you have Barack Obama, a younger, more charismatic, more likable politician than Hillary who has all the same views and 1/10 the baggage. Moreover, he's not a race hustler, he's not a race baiter, he's not a grievance mongerer.

So, how can Hillary beat him? By using his race against him. But, how can she do that without coming across as a racist herself?

Well, to prevent charges of racism, she uses surrogates to say things about Obama. Barack is secretly a Muslim (like Muhammad Ali). He's a drug dealer. Shuck and jive. LBJ did what MLK couldn't. Spadework. Then, Hillary apologizes. She lets people go. Why, those people need to be more careful about what they're saying! Yet and still, nothing was said that was too overt or blunt enough to trigger an "Imus reaction."

Now, here's where the perverse brilliance of the plan comes in: The Clintons understand the liberal base all too well. It's full of people who are incredibly hypersensitive people about race. This is something that white, liberal Democrats don't usually mind because the wrath of the racial grievance lobby is almost always aimed at Republicans.

But this time, predictably, when they became incensed by the Clinton campaign's comments and started rallying around Barack, white liberals cringed. How dare they aim those attacks at one of us! Then, the black voters started gravitating towards Obama and the white voters started gravitating towards Hillary.

This is playing out perfectly for the Clintons in South Carolina. It's a state with a large black population, Obama is winning handily, and Hillary is skipping the state. When Obama wins, it'll be blown off and portrayed as a state he won because he's black. The message: his appeal is limited to other blacks. The white candidate, Hillary Clinton, will be the only one who can compete nationally.

The latest comments from Bill Clinton are right out of this meme,

Former President Bill Clinton defended himself Wednesday against accusations that he and his wife had injected the issue of race into the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina, and he accused Senator Barack Obama of Illinois of putting out a "hit job" on him.

Scolding a reporter, Mr. Clinton said the Obama campaign was "feeding" the news media to keep issues of race alive, obscuring positive coverage of the presidential campaign here of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

"They know this is what you want to cover," Mr. Clinton told a CNN reporter in Charleston, in an apparent reference to the Obama campaign.

"Shame on you," the former president added.

See? It's really Jesse Jacks...I mean Obama, who's injecting race into the campaign, not the Clintons. Gosh, the Clintons just wish that Obama would stick to the issues instead of trying to make this about race.