Fox's Whitney: Hillary Clinton is “doomed” in '08 after “plantation” comment

On Cavuto on Business, Fox News business contributor Meredith Whitney asserted: “It will take more than a village to get Hillary Clinton elected in '08 after her comments on the plantation,” and then added: “She's doomed.” Whitney was joined by fellow Fox News contributor Herman Cain, who predicted that Clinton will discover that “a lot of us have already left the Democratic plantation. And you know what I mean.”


On the January 21 edition of Fox News' Cavuto on Business, Fox News business contributor Meredith Whitney asserted: “It will take more than a village to get [Sen.] Hillary [Rodham] Clinton [D-NY] elected in '08 after her comments on the plantation,” and then added: “She's doomed.” Whitney made her comments in the context of a discussion of remarks Clinton made during a January 16 speech in Harlem in which she said that, under Republican leadership, the House of Representatives “has been run like a plantation.”

Whitney's comments prompted another prediction by fellow panelist and Fox News contributor Herman Cain, who said that Clinton “took a play right out of the Democratic playbook, which was when you want to pander to the African Americans, you race-bait. And I happen to think, in 2006 as well as 2008, she's going to discover, along with a lot of other Democrats, that a lot of us have already left the Democratic plantation. And you know what I mean.”

Whitney's and Cain's comments echo those of other members of the media in the previous week who have claimed that Clinton played the “race card” but have overlooked her use of similar language in a 2004 interview with CNN, as well as similar uses of the term “plantation” by Republicans in recent years.

From the January 21 edition of Fox News' Cavuto on Business:

NEIL CAVUTO (host): All right, we're back to go “On the Spot.” Meredith, my friend, what have you got?

WHITNEY: It will take more than a village to get Hillary Clinton elected in '08 after her comments on the plantation. She's doomed.

CAVUTO: So the charge that Republicans ran Congress like a plantation, you think, hurts her?

WHITNEY: Yeah. Offended just about everyone.

CAVUTO: Maybe she's galvanizing, do you think she could be galvanizing her base?

WHITNEY: Well, she galvanized blacks, she galvanized me, a lady, and she, I mean, it's -- it's going to be tough sledding for her.

CAVUTO: All right. Herman Cain?

CAIN: Martin Luther King Jr. day, birthday celebration, is supposed to be about unity. She took a play right out of the Democratic playbook, which was when you want to pander to the African Americans, you race-bait. And I happen to think that in 2006 as well as 2008, she's going to discover, along with a lot of other Democrats, that a lot of us have already left the Democratic plantation. And you know what I mean.