The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

In 1959, a white reporter named John Howard Griffin artificially darkened his skin and took a trip through the Deep South passing as a Black man. He underwent the kind of humiliation that any Black person would undergo in those times. The racism made him depressed and angry. The skin treatments made him nauseous. When he wrote the book Black Like Me to detail his experiences, he was hanged in effigy and received numerous death threats.

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When Bill Clinton became America's First Black President, he underwent no skin treatments. Instead he was awarded that honor by poet Toni Morrison in her now infamous 1998 essay. No one made him sit in the back of Air Force One. No one hanged him in effigy. He remained a beloved world figure.

During the recent primary campaign in South Carolina, Bill Clinton effectively resigned as our First Black President and became just another angry white guy lobbing crude racist attacks at Barack Obama. When John Howard Griffin  became a white man again, he spent the rest of his life as an impassioned champion of racial equality. Draw your own conclusions.

W.E.B. DuBois once said that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. The recent behavior of Bill and Hillary Clinton suggests that the 21st Century will be no different. If two of our most prominent citizens, well-known and respected throughout the world, feel comfortable in the racial gutter, what does that say about them and the state of our nation?

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If you are not a political junkie and have no idea what I'm talking about, take a detour over to Alternet and read how the Clintons have been promoting Hillary's bid to be President. Strom Thurmond ­or Fightin' George Wallace would have been proud. Ronald Reagan, who famously launched his 1980 presidential bid in the very Mississippi county that killed civil rights workers Andy Goodman, Micky Schwerner and Jim Cheney, would have joined the chorus singing Dixie and waving a Confederate flag.

Some may argue that this is just hardball American politics and that it will all blow over before the general election. After all Black people are basically political realists and have traditionally backed "moderate" white Democratic politicians over the "Southern Strategy" GOP nominees.

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Maybe that's the point that our former First Black President is trying to make. Hillary can be counted on to maintain the racial tokenism favored by the corporate owners of the Democratic Party. God forbid the Democratic Party should ever become the rainbow coalition envisioned by Fanny Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, or even Jesse Jackson for that matter. A multiracial alliance of working class people pitted against the vast wealth of a frightened ruling class? That would be the New Deal without the Dixiecrats. Go ahead and think it..that could mean the dreaded the "S" word. I'll spell it out for you S-O-C-I-A-L-I-S-M.

Bill went to Oxford and Hillary attended Yale. They are both very brainy individuals who have spent a lot of time around Americans of all colors.Both have a pretty good understanding of the class nature of our American apartheid system.

In short, the Clintons regard themselves as the perfect mediators between corporate power and our badly fractured working class.

This is not suggest that Barack Obama is a new improved version of Eugene Victor Debs. Obama is a cautious conservative Democrat who is a master of telling different audiences exactly what they want to hear. A graduate of Harvard who learned to do politics in the bare-knuckled environment of South Side Chicago, Barack Obama presents himself as a better and more sophisticated mediator than the badly tarnished Hillary Clinton and her rapscallion of a husband.

Every car owner knows you need to periodically change the oil that lubricates the engine. Social systems are no different. Ya gotta change the class mediators or risk having your whole country get overheated and blow up in your face.

All of the major Democratic candidates( including Barack Obama) come with a corporate brand. But now Bill Clinton is a white guy again and Hillary Clinton sports a Jim Crow label.

They have 400 years worth of ugly racial politics behind them that says Hillary is gonna win.

Anybody wanna place bets?