This week marks the first time I’ve ever been offended by a politician’s campaign tactics. I love mudslinging, and I don’t really mind lying, but this has gone too far. Bill Clinton has decided to portray himself as a racist because, even though he and Hillary will be dragged through the mud, Barack will be hurt more if race becomes a prominent part of the campaign coverage leading up to Super Tuesday.

While Hillary was losing in South Carolina, Bill Clinton brushed off the loss by saying, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88.” The comparison was so obviously racist, even Bill Kristol, who had defended the Clintons a week before, called Clinton out on Fox News on Sunday.

As Iowans, we all know Obama is nothing like Jesse Jackson. Obama is not a civil rights leader or a reverend and has never publicly referred to Jews as “Hymie” or New York as “Hymietown.” Obama is not running on Jackson’s platform or trying to carry Jackson’s torch. While Jackson ran an explicitly race-based campaign, Obama’s campaign has tried to ignore race altogether.

The only reason Clinton might compare Jackson and Obama is that they’re both black. If I didn’t know any better, I might think that Clinton was narrow-minded or that he must assume all black people are the same. However, the more I look at the evidence, the more I believe Clinton is pretending to be racist as part of a calculated political strategy.

The Clintons would love it if voters believed Obama was just another Jesse Jackson – not the candidate of change, but a black candidate running a black campaign. Of course, having Bill say they’re similar isn’t enough – in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney said over and over that he was the candidate of change, but voters weren’t convinced – but the Clintons have hit upon the perfect way to make voters believe Obama is running a race-based campaign: Stir up so much righteous outrage that media coverage is dominated by allegations of racism and voters have no time to be inspired.

Even before the Jesse Jackson remark, the Clinton campaign had been regularly making vague, racist-sounding comments that drew fire from black leaders but were largely ignored by white people. An early example was a Clinton adviser’s reference to Obama’s drug use as a teenager. The biggest example before this weekend was Hillary Clinton’s comment that it was Lyndon Johnson, not Martin Luther King, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

As citizens, we must do whatever we can to ensure that Obama isn’t marginalized as just a black candidate. If the Clintons’ strategy succeeds, the damage will reach far beyond the 2008 race. If it succeeds, future candidates will use the same strategy any time they face a minority front-runner, turning every minority candidate into the next Jesse Jackson. And since Jackson lost, no minority candidate will be able to win until America’s demographics have changed enough for Hispanics to take over as the majority. In other words, if the Clintons can turn Obama into the next Jackson, our first minority president will be white.

Luckily, as Iowans, there’s a lot we can do. We’ve seen the Obamagic firsthand. We know Obama isn’t just a black candidate. We know that when college students and even high school students showed up to the caucuses in unprecedented numbers, they weren’t there to support Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. We know that when Republicans crossed party lines to caucus for Obama, they didn’t do it to make reparations for racial injustice and they didn’t do it because Alan Keyes wasn’t black enough.

As Iowans, we can tell everyone we know what Obama stands for. We can tell everyone we know about the moments that inspired us and the words that lifted us up. We can tell them how we felt at the end of caucus night, when we realized we weren’t the only ones who cared enough to show up, and when we realized our drive for change was bigger than any of us and even bigger than Obama himself.

Whether we met them on Facebook, on MySpace or at space camp, we all have friends in Super Tuesday states. Let’s tell them about the real Obama.

– Bill Waite is a graduate student in computer science from Terre Haute, Ind.