Bill Clinton reply to race question later leads to a testy exchange

WHYY-FM reporter Susan Phillips found herself in the middle of a national media imbroglio yesterday, the day after former President Bill Clinton told her the Barack Obama campaign had "played the race card" on him, then later denied saying it.

Phillips asked Clinton in a telephone interview late Monday about comments he'd made in January about the South Carolina primary that troubled some black political leaders.

Clinton noted at the time that while Obama had beaten Hillary Clinton there, Jesse Jackson had also won the state in 1984 and 1988.

Phillips said one African-American elected official in Philadelphia had seen Clinton as "marginalizing Obama as the black candidate," and Phillips asked if Clinton regretted what he'd said.

"No. I think that they played the race card on me," Clinton said. "And we now know from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it all along."

(In January, word emerged of a memo written and circulated by a South Carolina press aide for the Obama campaign listing allegedly racial comments made by Hillary Clinton and her supporters.)

Clinton spoke to Phillips for about three minutes on his record of appointing African-Americans as president and helping people of color as a former president.

He said his comments in South Carolina had been "taken out of context and twisted for political purposes by the Obama campaign to try to breed resentment elsewhere."

Asked yesterday by Mike Memoli, of NBC and the National Journal, what he'd meant by accusing the Obama campaign of playing the race card, Clinton responded: "No, no, no. That's not what I said. You always follow me around and play these little games and I'm not going to play your games today."

Clinton then accused Memoli of trying to "get another cheap story to divert the American people."

Phillips found her phone ringing yesterday with interview requests from national media, and the story began appearing on political blogs and online postings of national publications.

The episode got more attention because after Clinton apparently thought he had finished his call, he was heard on the tape saying to someone, "I don't think I should take any s--t from anybody on that, do you?" *