The Martin Luther King Day celebration at Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network is a rite of passage in an election year. And with so many big races this year, candidates and controversy were the order of the day....

"I need you to tell us what distinguishes Democrats from Republicans right now," [Senator Hillary Clinton] was asked.

Clinton's answer was provocative.

Said Clinton, "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation and you know what I'm talking about..."

Some House Republicans took immediate offense at Senator Clinton's choice of words.

Said Republican Congressman Peter King, of Long Island, "It's always wrong to play the race card for political gain by using a loaded word like plantation. But it is particularly wrong to do so on Martin Luther King Day."

--WCBS-TV, New York

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1992 Republican Party platform:

For low-income families, the Republican Party stands for a revolution in housing by converting public housing into homes owned by low-income Americans. President Bush is eager to work closely with the States to fight and win a new conservative war on poverty. The truest measure of our success will not be how many families we add to housing assistance rolls but, rather, how many families move into the ranks of homeownership. But every part of that opportunity agenda has been thwarted by landlord Democrats in Congress. We ask the electorate: End the strangulation of divided government. Give Republicans the chance to move housing policy off the Democrat Party plantation into the main-stream of American life.

National Republican Senatorial Committee press release, December 2005:

Charles Krauthammer Called [Senator Harry] Reid's Objection To [Judge Clarence] Thomas A Symbol Of The "Liberal Plantation Mentality," Where It Is Unacceptable To Be A Conservative African-American Man. Charles Krauthammer: "He said some nice things about Scalia and lousy stuff about Thomas. If you look at their records on the Court, Scalia and Thomas are two closest in terms of concurrences and agreements. . . . In the end, you've got to ask yourself, why Scalia, good, Thomas, bad in the eyes of a man like Reid. I say it's the liberal plantation mentality, in which if you're a man on the right and white, it's OK. If you are the man on the right and you're African-American, it's not." (Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume," December 6, 2004) (emphasis in original)

(See also: Joseph Farah, "Racism on Dem Plantation," World Net Daily, 11/19/03; Michael Gonzalez, "Hispanics for Jorge: Another Immigrant Group Wanders Off the Democratic Plantation," Wall Street Journal, 11/8/04; Edward Whelan, "The Liberal Plantation," National Review Online, 6/7/05; etc., etc.)