Finally, a mainstream columnist has hit hard at the heart of the smarmiest aspect of the Clinton campaign. On Saturday, Bob Herbert quoted Hillary in the New York Times:”There’s a pattern emerging here,” said Mrs. Clinton.

Herbert remarked: “There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way — any way — back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.

“He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

“The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.” And, Herbert added, it is also an insult to whites, many of whom feel one’s color shouldn’t matter.

Is there a sad corollary that it took an African-American columnist to point this out dramatically? Most of the media have been tiptoeing around the subject of race-baiting–bolstering their silence about scurrilous campaign tactics by showing that polling data indicates there is a problem for Obama.

Hillary had her chance to take the high road before Indiana and North Carolina. It would have brought many, including a fallen away cadre of disgusted feminists and women, immediately into her corner. That chance came during the dismal ABC-TV debate when George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson orchestrated continued questions about the black Rev. Wright.

Had Hillary only said: “I think these questions are unproductive and we need to get to questions that matter to the voters”! Instead she played the eager debater, nodding agreement with the moderators, asserting that continuing the debate on Rev. Wright – and by extension dramatizing Obama’s blackness — was legitimate inquiry, and adding her own fire to the woodpile. Now that her populist lipgloss moment dedicated to wooing white blue-collar voters is nearly over, even though she is expected to do very well tonight with this group, perhaps the Wellesley grad can find her “G’s” again—instead of goin’, walkin’, talkin’, thinkin’ and speakin’.

However, the race on race has just begun. As pundits now warn, Karl Rove and company are preparing to make the anti-Dukakis Willy Horton ads look like kindergarten exercises. The question now is not whether the Democrats have torn themselves apart in a vituperative primary but whether the Republicans will tear the country apart.

Today’s media could do all voters a service by asking the questions of both Obama and McCain that really matter: Who will you pick for your cabinet? As your advisors? For the Supreme Court? Hammer away. Don’t let them fudge with generalities. Don’t let them off the hook.

After these last eight years, we need to know up front. For far too long, presidential candidates have gotten away with keeping those appointments secret, for fear of alienating their prospective pool of possibilities.

This time it is up to the media to see that Obama and McCain do not duck and dodge on this. Whom they pick will say volumes about who they themselves really are.