Remarks by husband of Democratic frontrunner threaten to reopen controversy about 2008 description of Obama’s image as a media ‘fairytale’

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Bill Clinton has risked inflaming the Democratic primary’s current debate over race, telling a rally in support of his wife in Tennessee that everyone has some African ancestry.



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“Unless your ancestors, every one of you, are 100%, 100% from sub-Saharan Africa, we are all mixed-race people,” the former president told a crowd in Memphis on Friday.

Clinton’s comments – which echoed the actor Meryl Streep’s controversial statement at the Berlin film festival that “we’re all Africans, really” – came three weeks ahead of the Tennessee primary, part of Super Tuesday on 1 March. In polls in the state, his wife holds a three-to-one lead over the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. In 2008, she soundly defeated Barack Obama there.

However, Tennessee also has a high number of undecided Democrats – 26% – and among registered voters, Clinton’s negative ratings are the highest in any state. Democrats have warned that if she is the nominee she might drive a stronger turnout of Tennessee Republicans against her.

In his Tennessee stump speeches, Clinton credited Obama for doing “a better job than he has gotten credit for”. But he also criticized him for failing to end Washington gridlock.

“A lot of people say you don’t understand – it’s rigged now,” Clinton said. “Yeah, it’s rigged now because you don’t have a president that’s a change-maker.”

Clinton’s comments on race left open to question whether the former president, who has often been referred to as America’s first black president and who refers to himself as a “stand-in for the first black president”, is coming uncomfortably close to comments he made in 2008, in which he described Obama’s image in the media as a “fairytale”. That generated outrage among African Americans.

A book about that campaign, Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, claimed that Clinton told Senator Ted Kennedy during an appeal for his support that a few years before, Obama “would have been carrying our bags”.

Though Hillary Clinton has referred to Bill as her “secret weapon”, members of her campaign staff have expressed concern that his remarks have the potential to cause problems.

The notion of Clinton being America’s “first black president” comes from a comment made by the writer Toni Morrison in the New Yorker in 1998. Morrison argued that “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

The comment was interpreted then as a compliment but it has since been re-interpreted.

“People misunderstood that phrase,” Morrison told Time a decade later. “I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp.”