Flooding the zone used to be only a strategy in football... when the defense is playing a zone, you flood the zone with receivers to catch the gaps.
But the Clintons -- strategic masterminds of cynical politics if there ever were some -- have now started to apply it to Presidential Politics, and they are doing it with outstanding effect.
This is a two-pronged strategy, and it is working.
In Part I, you have former President Bill "Nice Thong!" Clinton sucking the oxygen out of the room with his battering attacks against Barack Obama. The goal of part one of the strategy is to keep the focus of negativity on him, and keep Hillary Clinton "above the fray". You can call it plausible deniability all you want, but this strategy was hatched in Chappaqua, and they are executing it with deft skill that even Richard Nixon would blush at.
By playing the role of political pit bull, Bill keeps the negative focus off Hillary, and let's him chip away at Obama's support little by little, smear by smear, insinuation by insinuation. Bill Clinton is the ultimate "surrogate", because few if any, will stand up and attack him in response. Especially all those fellating leftists who backed him during his shameful Monica phase, when he sent his own surrogates -- his Cabinet Officers -- into the Rose Garden to lie for him.
But there is another, darker side to this strategy. It's Part II. Deep in the darkest heart of American politics, the Clintons are using racialism to play a dark ugly game we have not seen in a long time -- since the days when D.C. Stephenson* ran Indiana Politics and the Klan.
Like the fox before the hounds, the Clintons are pushing the black vote in South Carolina -- and the rest of the South -- into the arms of Barack Obama. By raising the subtle "race" issues-- again through surrogates like Charlie Rangel, Robert Johnson, the Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts, and many other prominent American blacks -- the Clinton strategy is to push the black support in Obama's camp so much, that there is a white backlash across the broader South. A side benefit of this will also be to push the Asian vote (primarily on the West Coast) and Hispanic Vote (Southwest US) into their camp as well.
By "flooding the zone", they are hoping to provoke a racialist backlash against rising support for Obama.
Why would "America's First Black President" do this? Because primary elections are all about numbers.
The simple fact is, that while black Americans almost always break 90% for Democrats in general elections, in the primaries, they only account for about 25% of the Democrat vote total. To turn his tide, she needs to start shaving off white (and Hispanic, and Asian) votes. And the way to do that is to actally BOOST his support among black Americans, with the cold calculation that this sudden "surge" will cause a reaction among certain groups of whites, Hispanics, and Asians. It is pure racialism, because as Obama get's closer to that 25%, the belief on Team Clinton is that Hillary's chunk of the remaining 75% of Democrat voters will grow faster.
Hillary also has a racialist backstop: she knows that all those middle and upper class blacks that are already in her corner -- like Robert Johnson, Al Sharpton, the Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts, etc. -- they will stick with her come hell or high water. They are too invested in a Clinton candidacy -- and the spoils system that would unleash if she won the general election -- to do otherwise. But she also knows that all those blacks that support Obama -- who are more typically lower and lower-middle class -- will have no place else to vote but her in the general election. At worst, they stay home and do not vote for anyone.
She effectively takes them out of the game by "flooding the zone" (not unlike the defensive backs in a football game!).
So much for one man, one vote.
Devoid of original ideas, the Clintons are left with brash racialism to win the Democrat nomination.
D. C. Stephenson would be so proud.
* Full disclosure: Madge Oberholzer, who was kidnapped, forcibly intoxicated, and sadistically raped by D.C. Stephenson, and later committed suicide by taking poison (and for which Stephenson was convicted of murder), was a distant cousin of the author.