NEW YORK—We may never know for certain what Hillary Clinton was thinking when she chose, nearly two weeks ago, to bring up Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our powers of observation are limited to effect, not intent. But the effect of Clinton’s comment, and the verbal skirmishes it unleashed, has been clear: the transformation of Barack Obama from a presidential candidate to a black presidential candidate. And the beneficiary of that transformation seems to be her, and her alone.

”Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done,” Mrs. Clinton told Fox News on January 7. From these two little sentences came two weeks of controversy. “In other words,” wrote Marjorie Valbrun in the Washington Post, “‘I have a dream’ is a nice sentiment, but King couldn’t make it reality. It took a more practical and, of course, white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get blacks to the mountaintop.”

Clinton’s perceived slight against King was ultimately — and, one suspects, foreseeably — too much for others to leave alone. Four days after Clinton’s interview on Fox, James Clyburn, a Democratic Congressman from South Carolina and veteran of the civil rights movement, publicly chided her. ”We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” said Clyburn. ”It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.”

Two days later, Barack Obama caved. “Senator Clinton made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark, about King and Lyndon Johnson… And she, I think, offended some folks who felt that somehow diminished King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Act.”

It’s unclear what drove Obama to speak out. Maybe, as John Ibbitson suggests, he felt the need to prove he was “black enough” ahead of today’s primary in South Carolina; maybe, as others were left to defend King’s legacy, he wanted to avoid being “wussified,” as James Carville put it. Maybe he genuinely thought Clinton was wrong, and wanted to say so.

What does seem clear is that for Obama, talking about race was a mistake. His short statement may be one his campiagn has already come to regret, because with it, he made the topic of race legitimate. It was the reassertion of identity politics, and its results are laid bare in a poll, reported in Today’s Times: Clinton’s lead among white voters has increased in the last month, as has Obama’s lead among African-Americans. The very idea of Obama’s “post-racial” campaign now seems quaint and naive.

The irony of today’s primary in South Carolina is that if Obama wins, he loses. This is the impact of the debate of these past two weeks: now, a victory in South Carolina risks shifting what Obama stands for in the public imagination, away from the memory of Bobby Kennedy and toward the memory of Jesse Jackson Jr.

Jackson, after all, ran his presidential campaign largely as an extension of the campaign for civil rights. His candidacy wasn’t about unity, but about empowerment. Nobody thought of referring to Jackson’s campaign as post-racial. And Jesse Jackson won South Carolina.

By letting himself be drawn into a debate on race that began with Clinton’s comments two weeks ago, Barack Obama risks being defined by the very categories his campaign seemed to transcend. That may or may not have been the intent of Clinton’s original remark, but it very well seems to have been the effect. The damage is done.

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Posted on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 6:37 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.