The White House race in black and white

He's a smart fellow and so Barack Obama surely knew what was in store for him if he ever looked like taking the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton. After all, the Clintons' relationship with African-Americans has always been starkly instrumental.

When he was in trouble with white voters in New Hampshire in 1992, Governor Bill sprinted back to Little Rock to preside over the execution of a mentally retarded black man. To ensure her husband's victory in his re-election race in 1996, Hillary insisted Bill chop poor mothers - overwhelmingly black - off the welfare rolls.

Nonetheless, many blacks loved Bill, 'the first black president', and in the impeachment crisis over Monica Lewinsky they were his last true friends, as Bill recognised when he summoned the Rev Jesse Jackson into the White House to help him pray for forgiveness.

Obama learned, too, from the Rev Jackson's fate in 1988 when the Chicago preacher took Iowa by storm and surged on unprecedented victories in a slew of spring primaries. Within weeks Jackson had been neutralised by the opportune disclosure (by a black Washington Post reporter) of a private conversation in which Jackson had deprecated New York as 'Hymietown'. He spent the rest of the year alternately apologising and complaining that his function was to "bale up" black votes for the white Democratic ticket.

So Obama tried to inoculate himself by sticking limpet-like in his early Senate days to Senator Joe Lieberman, Israel's most rabid advocate in Congress.

But Obama's charmed life came to an end with his Iowa caucus victory. In New Hampshire, Hillary's campaign manager Billy Shaheen warmed up voters by reminding them Obama was unelectable because of his past "drug use" as a pot-smoker and a cokehead. Hillary snarled that whereas the black Martin Luther King was a merchant of dreams it took a white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get the Civil Rights bill through Congress. Andrew Cuomo, a prominent New York Democrat, said he was tired of Obama's "shuck and jive".

Then came the announcement earlier this week of a truce on the growing racial acrimony. This was instantly broken as Bob Johnson, America's first black billionaire and a big Hillary supporter, stood next to Hillary on a campaign platform in South Carolina and said the Clintons had been fighting for black justice while young Obama was still "doing something in the neighbourhood" ie doing drugs behind the schoolyard fence.

Racial decorum is paper-thin in America, and already the gloves are halfway off. Obama's home preacher and spiritual counselor, Jeremiah Wright, told a huge and applauding congregation in his church in Chicago that "some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton because her husband was good to us. That's not true! He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky."

The Rocky Mountain News reports that at a stockmen's gathering in Colorado a speaker joked that if Obama becomes president it won't be called the White House any more.

Now Clinton and Obama are locked in a desperate struggle for the South Carolina vote on January 26. This is called the black primary since it's the contest most likely, on the Democratic side, to be swayed by the large black vote. Clinton campaign money has been liberally distributed to the all-important black churches whose preachers will be rallying the vote.

The Clintons' instinct is to trash Obama, betting that whatever offence they cause to blacks will abate by the time Hillary has to face a Republican in the fall. Obama has the same problem in reverse. Any angry black talk may help him in the short term in South Carolina but would explode the vital message that he is safely "above" the racial divide.

It won't be long before the Clinton campaign circulates some of Rev Wright's sermons linking Zionism with racism. Already they're trying to link Wright's church to the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Jackson can predict accurately to Obama what will happen next and those speeches praising Senator Lieberman won't help.

A Clinton-Obama ticket is not likely. The Clintons take their fights bitterly and while it may be true that America is ready for a woman president, the notion that it would be similarly receptive to a black president is truly open to challenge. ·