Desperate and willing to do anything to win, the Clintons resorted to a naked form of racism aimed directly at white working-class voters in the rural portions of the state. Their message: Barack Obama cannot win because he's black.

In the early stages of the campaign, it was Clinton's cadre who kept playing the race card. In New Hampshire, Clinton's co-chair, Billy Shaheen, accused Obama of being a drug dealer; then there was the photograph of Sen. Barack Obama in Somali garb leaked to the press by Clinton's staff.

In the aftermath of the South Carolina primary, former President Bill Clinton compared Obama's victory to those of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. His message was clear: Obama was a marginal, black candidate.

Then came the disgraceful remarks of Geraldine Ferraro, who could not, and would not, shut her mouth. "If Obama was a white man," she charged, "he would not be in this position." And she was adamant and unapologetic amid the resulting outcry. "Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist," she proclaimed. "I will not be discriminated against because I'm white."

Say what?

The Clintons refused to publicly call for Ferraro's resignation. Ferraro remained unrepentant when she finally did resign. "The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you," she bitterly wrote Hillary. And she never apologized for her remarks.

To anyone who has followed the Clinton campaign closely, it is all too apparent that her top political strategists -- reeling from losses from coast to coast and badly miscalculating the grassroots power of the Obama movement -- made a tactical decision to go negative, as that would be the only way for Clinton to stop Obama and somehow allow her to steal the nomination.

And go negative they did -- with a subtle yet consistent racism underscoring every turn. The now notorious red-phone-at-3:00-a.m. television ad used by Clinton during the Texas primary, as Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson noted in the New York Times, was reminiscent of D. W. Griffith's racist film Birth of a Nation, which helped revive the Ku Klux Klan.