A legacy is a delicate thing.

If you say the name “Orval Faubus” today, there is only one episode that resonates in the general American consciousness: His famous stand against the integration of the Arkansas public school system, which forced a reluctant President Eisenhower to take the drastic step of federalizing that state’s national guard, sending in the 101st airborne division to protect black students seeking to enroll in Central High School in Little Rock.

But Faubus was a more complicated figure than that. For the most part, his record as governor of Arkansas was a positive one; in general, he had a non-confrontational relationship with the federal government, cooperating with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and helping them both carry Arkansas in their respective elections. In 1962, Faubus took a brave stand and spurned with the local White Citizens’ Councils — which were essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — and won re-election without their endorsements. In the 1950s, before the school desegregation crisis, Faubus was actually viewed as something of a liberal — in his first election victory, Faubus won in spite of allegations that he had Communist sympathies — and during the first few months of his administration in 1955, Faubus desegregated state buses and public transportation, and began to investigate the possibility of introducing multi-racial schools.

What happened? It really wasn’t that complicated: He got caught up in the corrupting vortex that is the pressures of electoral politics, and he, at least publicly, abandoned much of his progressivism to maintain power in a state in which segregation had the support of most of the state’s voters. And now that Faubus has been dead for more than a decade, his legacy is not a topic up for much debate. He’s remembered as a diehard segregationist, pure and simple.

And now, half a century after the most remembered battles of Faubus’ political life, there’s another former Arkansas governor who’s running the same risk of leaving his legacy in tatters.

As Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip from South Carolina, attested, Bill Clinton’s recent statements and perceptions that he has played the race card have “caused people to say things to me [about Clinton] that I never thought I would hear.” What these people are saying are iterations of the same general theme: that Bill Clinton has morphed into a sort of demagogue, willing to stoke racial tensions and stick his fingers into still-unhealed wounds to win votes for his wife’s presidential candidacy.

It is undeniable that Bill Clinton has changed throughout the course of this election. In truth, the former president is not a difficult man to understand. He’s a political animal, pure and simple, and he’s a man who, as has been proven on far too many occasions, is all too willing to give in to his basest impulses. For most of this election season his wife has been seen as not only a shoe-in for the Democratic nomination but the presidency, and Bill Clinton was likely feeling pretty secure with the knowledge that, come January 2009, he would be back in the White House.

This is what prompted Bill Clinton to point out, during the South Carolina primary, that this was a state that had voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, thus making the implicit suggestion that the results of that state could be ignored as the votes of racial extremists. (This is despite the fact that Jesse Jackson was an individual whom the old Bill Clinton had a tremendous amount of respect and real admiration for). This is what has prompted Bill Clinton just a few days ago to accuse the Obama campaign of trying to play racial politics, a naked attempt to try and communicate to white voters the impression that Sen. Clinton is their candidate.

For those who remember what Bill Clinton once stood for, this is tragic. This is the same man whom Toni Morrison once called “the first black president.” Bill Clinton was key in helping make black voters feel like there was a presidential candidate who actually took their needs to heart, following the sordid racial politics that marred George H.W. Bush’s successful 1988 presidential campaign. It was because of the incredible loyalty that many black voters felt for Bill Clinton that Sen. Barack Obama only started out with approximately half of the African-American vote in early presidential polls — people forget this now, but Hillary Clinton was beating Obama in most early polls of black voters in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses.

It was only after Bill Clinton made this election partially about race that black voters shifted en masse to Obama, supporting him with upwards of 90 percent of the vote in most primaries. But the fact is, regardless of what Bill Clinton does during the ensuing months before the Democratic Convention, he can’t give his wife the election. Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic candidate — the only real questions left now is whether Bill Clinton’s divisive actions during the primary season will supersede the uniquely positive racial politics of his presidency, and whether, after the nomination is officially decided, he will do everything in his power to heal the rifts he has almost singlehandedly caused.

The tale of Orval Faubus should be a cautionary one for Bill Clinton. Hopefully he isn’t too caught up in an increasingly futile quest to regain power to notice it.

Editorials Editor Asher Smith is a College freshman from Great Neck. N.Y.