"Hillary insults voters in attack on Rev. Wright"

March 26, 2008 | BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist

What I find the most sickening about politics is that some politicians think the American people are idiots.

No, strike that.

Some politicians depend on them being idiots. That's how they get elected.

For instance, what are voters supposed to believe about Sen. Hillary Clinton's back-handed criticism of Sen. Barack Obama's decision not to disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his former longtime pastor?

After three weeks of acting as if the cat had her tongue, Clinton coyly told reporters on Tuesday that "he [Wright] would not have been my pastor."

"You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend," she said.

Voters who are still trying to sort out fact from fiction with respect to Trinity and Wright are not supposed to notice that Clinton is taking the low road.

Instead of following Obama's lead and using this incident to seek racial reconciliation, Clinton is further fanning the flames by attempting to paint herself as the more racially sensitive candidate.

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that."

Since Obama has already spoken out against Wright's remarks, Clinton is simply trying to milk the controversy for political advantage.

But Americans are supposed to be too dumb to see that.

Indeed, the fact that Clinton found her voice on this issue on the same day she was outed as having misstated her Bosnia experience is merely a coincidence.

Is it Clinton's fault that she was asked about the Wright controversy during an editorial board meeting with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review?

Is it her fault that she was put on this spot at the same time some of the media were grilling her about her embellished account of her 1996 Bosnia trip?

Of course not.

Nor is it her fault that the American people seem to be more upset by Wright's remarks about race than about Clinton's obvious lies.

Few of us have ever had to dodge gunfire as Clinton claimed to have done, but if we had, we would remember it.

So Clinton's explanation that she "misspoke" and that she was "sleep-deprived" when she retold the bogus incident (more than once) was insulting.

But here's what I find depressing.

Like former President Bill Clinton, who became unglued in South Carolina and began exploiting our racial divisions, Hillary Clinton is playing the same game.

The Clintons are no strangers to the black church when they are campaigning.

They know Obama went as far as he could go in addressing this issue, and that he has left it up to the voters to decide.

The Clinton strike Tuesday was a shameful attempt to manipulate those voters.

After all, given that Clinton is embracing the support of a governor who has publicly declared that white men in Pennsylvania won't vote for a black man, she isn't the one to talk.