Clyburn mulls mission to try to end racial clash

The top African-American member in Congress’s leadership is considering flying home early to South Carolina this week on a mission to cool a raging racial debate that has engulfed the Democratic presidential contest.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said he may leave Washington before the end of the week to try to soothe tensions that have broken out just a week before his state’s crucial Democratic primary. The tensions mounted after controversial comments on race and the civil rights movement by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and former

{mosads}President Bill Clinton were seized upon by supporters of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Clyburn told reporters Tuesday he’d received a call from a former staffer who now works in the media in South Carolina urging him to come home, and that his daughter, a public official in South Carolina, also had urged him to defuse the issue.

Clyburn said the war of words on race was distracting attention from real issues like healthcare, the war in Iraq and housing.

“For the past week, nobody’s been talking about these problems. I think that’s a shame,” Clyburn said. “I don’t think anyone who looked at their records would doubt their commitment to equality.”

He also said he would stick to his pledge not to endorse any candidate.

“I told my party I had to stay out of it,” he said. “I would be breaking with too many people.”

Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement whose leadership post has made him a political powerbroker in his home state, held the Tuesday briefing specifically to call for a truce in the racial debate.

In doing so, he joined the call made by the two candidates themselves the night before when Obama said, “We’re all Democrats, we all believe in civil rights, we all believe in equal rights.” Clinton issued a statement that said “let’s come together” to expand rights for all Americans.

The racial issue is especially important in South Carolina, where the African-American vote is said to make up half the vote. Clinton’s claim to the support her husband inspired among black voters has been challenged by Obama’s potential to become the first black president.

South Carolina’s primary has become a vital test now that no clear victor has emerged from the two early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In his briefing and in a Monday night interview with television host Charlie Rose, Clyburn gave details of how heated the debate had become. He said he’d talked to both Clinton and Obama, and Bill Clinton twice.

Clyburn said he spoke to Bill Clinton within an hour of the lawmaker’s return from a 10-day trip abroad. The swiftness with which the Clintons reached out to Clyburn highlights the urgency and importance of the issue.

He said Bill Clinton sought to explain what he meant by his heavily scrutinized “fairy tale” comment, and Clyburn said he took the former president at his word. It is unclear who initiated the conversations, though Clyburn suggested that Bill Clinton reached out to him, saying he “heard” from the ex-president.

The dispute began last week, when Hillary Clinton, making the case for her experience in government, said “Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”

Clinton quickly sought to clarify her remarks, but many black voters felt she was diminishing the revered civil rights leader.

Mr. Clyburn raised the stakes in the fight later in the week when he told The New York Times that Hillary Clinton’s comments “bothered me a great deal.”

“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics. It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those,” Clyburn said.

He also said Bill Clinton’s description of Obama’s campaign narrative as a “fairy tale” seemed insulting.

Clyburn said it misses the point to argue whether Martin Luther King Jr. or President Lyndon Johnson was more important to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964.

“I don’t think you can go back and make value judgments about who was more important, the person who brings it to the table or the person who gets it passed,” Clyburn said.