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This year, we have a black man, a white woman, a Mormon, a thrice-married Catholic and an ordained Baptist minister all running for president. What a country. Yes, we have really come a long way, baby.

Or have we?

The day after Barack Obama trounced Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democrat primary, her husband (our first "black" president) dismissed the victory by pointing out that Jesse Jackson won the same primary in 1984 and 1988. Following on the heels of previous attempts to inject racial politics into his wife's fight for the Democrat presidential nomination, clearly, Bubba was doing his best to marginalize Obama's candidacy by implying that Obama is the Jesse Jackson of 2008, a black candidate who has no chance of actually being elected.

Bill Clinton's mentor was U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat and a supporter of racial segregation. Fulbright signed the Southern Manifesto opposing the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which declared the "separate but equal" doctrine for public schools unconstitutional. He joined with the Dixiecrats in filibustering the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964. And he voted against the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

This was Clinton's mentor, his hero, his teacher. Fulbright's party had been the party of racism, slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. Today's Democrats like to believe this ugly side of their party is gone. The truth is that it is simply hidden beneath a shroud of liberal language and lofty sounding rhetoric, and Bill Clinton is Exhibit A in the Dems-R-Bigots party.

Former Klansman Robert Byrd, who served as the Democrat's Senate Majority leader in the 1970s, still sits in the U.S. Senate.

When George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, the most outwardly liberal members of the Senate pulled every dirty trick imaginable to derail the nomination. The racist tactics of the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, some members of which had trumped up false charges of sexual harassment against a good and decent man, were stunning. More stunning, however, were Thomas's inspired words during his testimony.

"This is a circus," Thomas told the committee. "It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee rather than being hung from a tree."

Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than being a black man standing between a liberal Democrat senator and ideological control of the U.S. Supreme Court is being a black man standing between Bill and Hillary Clinton and their triumphant return to the White House. The irony is that there is virtually no difference between the ideology of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, so anyone laboring under the delusion that the Clintons have ever been in politics for the sake of the cause should find another fantasy in which to believe.

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