Bill Channels Wilentz

Politico's Ben Smith has the audio of Bill Clinton, advancing Sean Wilentz's bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process:

Clinton cited"memos from the campaign" (presumably Wilentz's articles) that proved Obama's intent. (This morning, when asked about the former President's comments, Obama appropriately responded with astonishment.)

Clinton might want to check back with a historian about his odd recollection of the 1988 race, in which, he claimed, Jesse Jackson put together a coalition of African-Americans and working-class whites, as opposed to the" cultural liberals" that Obama has attracted. I don't recall many Reagan Democrats or even unionized white voters bolstering Jackson's vote total.

In the last hours of the PA race, Clinton has also championed another peculiar Wilentz argument--that Hillary would be winning the Democratic race if only the Democrats used an extreme version of the GOP's winner-take-all rules and awarded to state winners all delegates from the state.

Of course, if we're going to assume that procedures can or should be changed in the middle of the process, Obama would have the nomination wrapped up if the Dems based their nomination on the votes of states beginning with"W."

Neither Clinton nor Wilentz appear to have considered that the Obama campaign, probably the best-run presidential campaign in memory, might have employed a different strategy if the Dems utilized state-based winner-take-all rules.