In 2008 Bill Clinton said Obama's side played the race card, that media carried water for Obama, that media "lived for" talking about race

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1/24/2008, "Bill Clinton says Obama's campaign brought race into presidential contest," NY Daily News, Helen Kennedy, Charleston, SC

"Bill Clinton angrily denied Wednesday that his wife's campaign was engaged in any dirty tricks and declared that it was Barack Obama's side - not the Clintons - who injected race into the contest.

"She did not play the race card, but they did," he charged, saying he was quoting Clinton backers and civil rights leaders Andrew Young and John Lewis. 

"This is almost like once you accuse someone of racism and bigotry, the facts become irrelevant." 

Former state Democratic Party head Dick Harpootlian, who worked for Bill Clinton in 1992 but has endorsed Obama in the 2008 contest, told CNN that the Clintons were engaged in a pattern of divisive comments meant to "suppress the vote, demoralize voters and distort the record."

He said the tactics reminded him of the godfather of dirty campaigning, Republican Lee Atwater. 

The ex-President, whose staffers tried fruitlessly to pull him out of the Charleston restaurant where he had been stumping for his wife, lost his cool when asked about the Atwater comparison. "This is crazy. This rhetoric is getting a little carried away," he told reporters. "I spent all my life fighting those people." 

Clinton said repeatedly that ordinary voters never ask him about race - even though voters asked about it four times at four public events in a row here. 

Just before his outburst, a black woman at the Charleston event asked him how she should explain the "race-baiting in the news media" to young people. 

In Greenville on Tuesday, a young man asked if he was hurting his legacy with black voters. Clinton later said he suspected the questioner worked for Obama.

Clinton accused reporters of carrying Obama's water. 

"They are feeding you this because they know this is what you want to cover. This is what you live for," he said. "So they just spin you up. Shame on you."

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