Clinton and Obama Call for Truce Over Dr. King Dispute

By PATRICK HEALY
Published: January 15, 2008

Speaking to black and Hispanic New Yorkers, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried on Monday to quell a controversy over race in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination by praising the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and describing him as a trailblazer for both herself and her rival, Senator Barack Obama.

Mrs. Clinton said President Lyndon B. Johnson had been the shepherd of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, enacting a priority of Dr. King — a comment that Obama supporters and some other people viewed as minimizing Dr. King’s work.

Mrs. Clinton quickly said she had meant no slight, and on Monday she issued a statement proposing a truce. At about the same time, though, a prominent supporter of hers, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, said in an interview that Mr. Obama was “absolutely stupid” for calling Mrs. Clinton’s original remark ill-advised.

“How race got into this thing is because Obama said ‘race,’ ” Mr. Rangel said on the NY1 cable channel. “I would challenge anybody to belittle the contribution that Dr. King has made to the world, to our country, to civil rights, and the Voting Rights Act. But for him to suggest that Dr. King could have signed that act is absolutely stupid.”

A Clinton adviser said Mr. Rangel was speaking for himself.

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, said at a news conference that Mrs. Clinton had always been “on the right side” of civil rights issues — but in television interviews, he also accused the Clinton campaign of playing up the race issue as “strategy” and of being “silly.” By Monday evening, he urged Democrats to call a truce to avoid dividing the party.

The back and forth came on a day when good-government groups jumped into the fray, criticizing Mrs. Clinton for, they said, appearing to play down the importance of an ethics reform bill Mr. Obama championed.

The campaign day began with Mrs. Clinton’s appearance before members of a service workers union in Manhattan, where she received a tepid reception. The audience, mostly made up of security guards, applauded steadily when she entered — but they did not roar for their hometown candidate, and there were a few scattered boos.

Mrs. Clinton said Dr. King, whose coming birthday observance was the focal point of the labor union event, had made it possible for her and Mr. Obama to be “where we are today,” and she emphasized the importance of Democratic and racial unity.

“We may differ on minor matters,” Mrs. Clinton said of Mr. Obama, “but when it comes to what is really important, we are family. Both Senator Obama and I know that we are where we are today because of leaders like Dr. King and generations of men and women like all of you.”

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, said on a campaign swing through northern Nevada that he was concerned that a heated discussion of racial issues in the presidential campaign could divide the Democratic Party.

“I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit for tat, back and forth, that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this,” he said at a news conference. “We’ve got too much at stake at this time in our history to be engaging in this kind of silliness.”

Asked whether he believed that either Mrs. Clinton or former President Bill Clinton had shown racial insensitivity in recent days, Mr. Obama said: “I don’t want to rehash that. I think that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have historically and consistently been on the right side of civil rights issues.”

In an interview on the “Charlie Rose Show,” Representative James E. Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat who was among those raising concern last week about the Clinton comments, urged the candidates to focus on policy issues that can distinguish them and the party.

“People are talking about race versus gender when we ought to be talking about Democrats versus Republicans,” said Mr. Clyburn, who as the Democratic whip is the highest-ranking African-American in Congress.

The good-government groups that criticized Mrs. Clinton took issue with her comments about the ethics reform bill. While she voted for it, she has suggested that the legislation was not a landmark change and that Mr. Obama was hardly alone in championing it.

Fred Wertheimer, president and chief executive of Democracy 21, which promotes campaign finance reform, said the bill contained some of “the most important and comprehensive ethics and lobbying reforms since the Watergate era.”

Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, said: “I think it should be seen as the decent, credible and substantial legislation that it was. It shouldn’t be belittled.”

A Clinton campaign spokesman noted that the bill had been introduced by Senate leaders and that Mrs. Clinton was chiefly questioning the practical effect of a provision limiting meals paid for by lobbyists.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Nevada, and Michael Falcone from Washington.