Eye on 2016, Clintons Rebuild Bond With Blacks - Many African-Americans took Mr. Clinton’s fairy tale comment in 2008 to mean that Mr. Obama’s candidacy itself was a hopeless fantasy.

From The New York Times:

[Former President Bill Clinton quoted Scripture and proudly told a black] crowd that he was once described as “the only white man in America who knew all the verses to ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ ”

Since Mrs. Clinton left the secretary of state post in February, she and her husband have sought to soothe and strengthen their relationship with African-Americans, the constituency that was most scarred during her first bid for the presidency. Five years after remarks by Mr. Clinton about Barack Obama deeply strained the Clintons’ bond with African-Americans, the former first family is setting out to ensure that there is no replay of such trouble in 2016.

“I think that this is an effort to repair whatever damage they felt may have been done in ’08,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton “know that there are some who have lingering questions, if not antipathy, towards them,” Mr. Sharpton said.

This task has taken on new urgency given the Democratic Party’s push to the left, away from the centrist politics with which the Clintons are identified. Strong support from black voters could serve as a bulwark for Mrs. Clinton against a liberal primary challenge should she decide to run for president in 2016. It would be difficult for a progressive candidate, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, to rise if the former first lady takes back the black voters she lost to Mr. Obama and retains the blue-collar white voters who flocked to her.

“That speech that she gave regarding voting suppression was very, very significant and meaningful,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress. Mr. Clyburn, who clashed sharply with Mr. Clinton in 2008, said Mrs. Clinton was “now in a very good place with the African-American community.”
      

Tavis Smiley, a black commentator, argued that this was because “they have now learned the important lesson that there’s a distinction between a coronation and an election.”

 

Mr. Clinton has a rich, if occasionally fraught, history with African-Americans. He was a New South governor and a progressive on race who would eventually be called “the first black president” by the author Toni Morrison. But he infuriated blacks in 2008 when, after Mr. Obama won a big South Carolina primary victory, he seemed to dismiss the achievement by reminding the press that the Rev. Jesse Jackson had won the state twice and calling Mr. Obama’s antiwar position “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

      

Many African-Americans took Mr. Clinton’s fairy tale comment to mean that Mr. Obama’s candidacy itself was a hopeless fantasy.