Dick Morris is a political genius.

When everyone scoffed at the prospect of Hillary Clinton wanting to run for President, he was the one person who repeatedly said it was going to happen.

And just this past week, he made a prediction about Hillary’s New Hampshire campaign that appeared to be chillingly accurate.

Last Sunday evening on Fox News Channel, Morris said: “I think that what she is going to do is she is going to say Obama is unelectable, Americans won’t elect him, he can’t beat the Republican Party, America is not ready for Obama, he doesn’t have the experience to win, and what she is going to mean is that they won’t vote for an African-American, but she won’t say it. She’ll say everything but, but that’s what she means.”

As if on cue, THE VERY NEXT MORNING, Sen. Clinton appeared on NBC’s Today Show and talked about the choice that voters were faced with in New Hampshire. She said the following: “When they say to themselves, OK, I have a choice between a truly inspirational speaker (Obama) who has not done the kind of spade work with the sort of experience that another candidate has…”

Spade work. That’s some choice of words for a black political opponent, no?

I have no idea if the use of a phrase like “spade work” in referring to Sen. Obama’s lack of experience was intentional on the part of Mrs. Clinton. If it was, that’s precisely what Dick Morris was saying the night before on “Hannity and Colmes,”, that she was going to inject race into New Hampshire without appearing to inject race. While “spade work” is certainly a common gardening phrase, I’m not sure anyone has ever used it on the campaign trail. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never used the phrase in my life. In fact, it would be fascinating to do a Lexis/Nexis search and see if she has EVER used the phrase, “spade work” in any of her interviews or speeches.

Care to wager that she hasn’t?

But it doesn’t actually matter if she meant to do it or not. That’s practically irrelevant.

Consider for a moment what would happen to a Republican candidate if he used the word “spade” in any way, shape or form while referring to a black opponent.

History, of course, confirms this. Sen. George Allen thinks a guy’s name is “macaca?” He’s gone. Sen. Trent Lott wishes Strom Thurmond a happy 100th birthday and says he would have made a fine president? Stick a fork in him.

Just this week, a golf commentator on the Golf Channel was joking around with Nick Faldo on the air about other golfers ganging up on Tiger Woods and she laughingly said,

“They’ll take him out back to the alley and lynch him.” The Golf Channel’s response? She was promptly suspended without pay for two weeks.

The reaction to Hillary using a double entendre which means both a gardening tool and a racial epithet for Barack Obama on The Today Show?

Crickets chirping. Silence. Nothing. Nada. Not one word from Al Sharpton, not a peep out of NBC.

Once again, the double standard is laughable. The righteous indignation from the left (and left-leaning media) usually reserved for any and all Republicans is always absent when it comes to liberal Democrats.

Picture Rudy Giuliani being asked about Obama’s candidacy and saying, “Let’s just call a spade a spade here. He can’t win.”

I can hear the boiling tar and feather-gathering already. We all know that “calling a spade a spade” isn’t any more racial than a gardening tool. But if a Republican, any Republican, were to use that phrase in any context for a black opponent it would be all over for that candidate. The media would come unhinged.

Hillary says that Barack Obama “hasn’t done the spade work” in front of millions of viewers?

Not a single, solitary word. And she goes on to post the upset victory over Obama in New Hampshire later in the week.

Dick Morris is a political genius.