BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s really got — well, you know. No matter how well-intended, the average white politician can’t get away with trotting out a "black speech" before black audiences without being accused of shameless pandering.

But Clinton came to the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Las Vegas last week and did just that.

I can’t say with certainty that Clinton doesn’t ever mention "It takes a village to raise a child" when addressing white audiences, but the African proverb is usually tossed out at least once when she’s speaking to a black one.

In fact, the speech she delivered during what was billed as "A Conversation with America’s Candidates" was Clinton’s urban manifesto.

The former first lady lamented the crisis of 1.4 million young black males between the ages of 16 and 24 "who are out of school and out of work and too often out of hope," and pointed out that nearly one out of every three young African-American men are not "earning legal wages or learning marketable skills.

"They grow up without fathers, wind up in prison, or end up losing their lives, or taking lives due to guns and violence," Clinton said. "We’ve been wringing our hands and listening to this exact same conversation for years. Well, I reject that conversation. I reject a conversation that paints with a broad brush 1.4 million young men as a threat, as a headache, or as a lost cause. I reject it as a string of disappointments, failures, casualties of a broken system. It is not who they are and not what they can be. I think it is time we shifted the conversation."

I wholeheartedly agree.

Her husband is partly to blame for some of our woes

This is a conversation that should be shifted to the white establishment across America where jobs, resources and political clout are controlled. I understand that the campaign cycle is brutal, and a candidate can’t possibly have a speech to fit every occasion, but Clinton basically gave black journalists the same speech she recently delivered to the National Urban League.

Journalists of color obviously care deeply about those 1.4 million young men. But we’ve heard the lament before.

More important, most black journalists don’t cover social ills to the extent that their predecessors did. Clinton was in a room of black professionals — many of whom are at the top of their game and experts in politics, health care, foreign policy, environmental issues, transportation and other issues that affect all Americans.

So it was pandering on Clinton’s part to show up and paint herself as the possible savior of 1.4 million lost black souls. Because the truth of the matter is the root of the "black male crisis" can be traced back to the Clinton era.

In a rare private interview with a group of black columnists from across the country, Clinton was reminded that the explosion in the prison population — which has led to a whole host of social ills in the black community — was spawned, in part, by Bill Clinton’s decision to sign a bill that created the wide disparity in the way people are punished for crimes involving crack cocaine, compared to those who are prosecuted for powder cocaine.

Derrick Z. Jackson, a columnist for the Boston Globe, asked Clinton about the irony and pointed out that even as he signed the bill, the former president called the law "immoral and unjust."

"Was the law a mistake?" Jackson asked.

In response, Hillary hemmed and hawed about the political trading her husband had to do to get a crime bill passed that put more police officers on the street.

"There were some unfortunate compromises . . . one in particular that has come to symbolize the disparity and unfairness in the criminal justice system," Clinton acknowledged. "As a matter as practical politics, we might not be able to get from where we are from 100-1 to parity. We might be able to get to 10-1."

When the same question was put to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) the next day, there was no equivocation.

"Yes, it was a mistake," he told the same group of columnists. "There was a lot of talk of super-predators, and the whole environment in which this [bill] was generated. Even though the politics was tough in the ’90s, I took some tough votes to make sure we didn’t see the perpetuation [of this unfairness]."

Hillary Clinton is crafting a message to black voters that trades on her experience — as well as her husband’s immense popularity with African Americans, so much so that she was comfortable joking during her session with columnists that she is in an "interracial marriage" — an apparent reference to author Toni Morrison’s designation of Bill Clinton as America’s "first black president."

Laments aside, black voters should also remember that the "first black president" really let them down.