The White House race in black and white

He's a smart fellow and so Barack Obama surely knew what was in store for him if he ever looked like taking the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton. After all, the Clintons' relationship with African-Americans has always been starkly instrumental.

When he was in trouble with white voters in New Hampshire in 1992, Governor Bill sprinted back to Little Rock to preside over the execution of a mentally retarded black man. To ensure her husband's victory in his re-election race in 1996, Hillary insisted Bill chop poor mothers - overwhelmingly black - off the welfare rolls.

Nonetheless, many blacks loved Bill, 'the first black president', and in the impeachment crisis over Monica Lewinsky they were his last true friends, as Bill recognised when he summoned the Rev Jesse Jackson into the White House to help him pray for forgiveness.

Obama learned, too, from the Rev

Jackson's fate in 1988 when the Chicago preacher took Iowa by storm and surged on unprecedented victories in a slew of spring primaries. Within weeks Jackson had been neutralised by the opportune disclosure (by a black Washington Post reporter) of a private conversation in which Jackson had deprecated New York as 'Hymietown'. He spent the rest of the year alternately apologising and complaining that his function was to "bale up" black votes for the white Democratic ticket.

So Obama tried to inoculate himself by sticking limpet-like in his early Senate days to Senator Joe Lieberman, Israel's most rabid advocate in Congress.

But Obama's charmed life came to an end with his Iowa caucus victory. In New Hampshire, Hillary's campaign manager Billy Shaheen warmed up voters by reminding them Obama was unelectable because of his past "drug use" as a pot-smoker and a cokehead. Hillary snarled that whereas the black Martin Luther King was a merchant of dreams it took a white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get the Civil Rights bill through