Orrin Judd compares and contrasts 2000 and 2008:

There's a very simple question you can ask to gauge the racial character of the race: what are three policy changes Senator Obama has said he will pursue if elected?

Recall that eight years ago, if you'd asked the same question about W (the eventual winner), it would have been easy for people to answer: cut taxes, test kids in school, privatize Social Security, and give government money to religious charitable organizations, just to name a few of the big ones.

But ask yourself--and most readers here follow politics to some considerable degree--what are Obama's issues? What does he want to change? What would be the point of his presidency?

Isn't the sole purpose of his candidacy to afford America an opportunity to vote for a black guy for no other reason than that he's black?

How is Hillary Clinton supposed to run against that without race entering the discussion?

She can't, and as Matt Bai recently noted, "The most dangerous place to be in the rest of the country is between the Clintons and an elected office." The result, which has caused the Clinton attack machine to aim left instead of right for once, hasn't been pretty, as we've all seen. David Brooks writes:

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill [Err, that should be Ward Connerly, as Betsy Newmark, and not the Times' layers and layers of fact checkers noted--Ed] and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Clinton is suffering most. She is now accused, absurdly, of being insensitive to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bill Clinton’s talk of a “fairy tale,” which was used in the context of the Iraq debate, is now being distorted into a condemnation of the civil rights movement. Hillary Clinton finds that in attacking Obama, she is accused of being hostile to the entire African-American experience.

Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

Huh?

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits. Obama’s campaign drew up a memo delineating all of the Clintons’ supposed racial outrages. Bill Clinton is frantically touring black radio stations to repair any wounds.

Meanwhile, Clinton friend Robert Johnson, a one-man gaffe machine, reminds us of Obama’s drug use and accuses him of being like Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Another Clinton supporter, Gloria Steinem, notes that black men were given the vote a half-century before women.

As Brooks writes, "This is the logical extreme of the identity politics that as been floating around this country for decades. Every revolution devours its offspring, and it seems the multicultural one does, too."