Hillary’s Last Gasp Dismisses Blacks, Disses Working-Class Whites
What was the intent when Hillary Clinton said this to USA Today on Wednesday:
I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on…Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and whites in both states who (have) not completed college (are) supporting me…There’s a pattern emerging here.
Pundits left and right inferred the obvious: Clinton was questioning the ability of a black candidate to win the White House without the white working-class vote. She presumes much. While most of the growing criticism of Clinton’s comments focuses on her dismissive attitude towards black voters, her presumptuous attitude towards working-class whites is equally damning. Both the dismissing and the dissing come from a deep-seated belief in racial and class-based stereotypes and a longstanding reliance on inherently divisive identity politics.
Peggy Noonan reports what Democratic insiders are saying off the record about Hillary Clinton:
She has unleashed the gates of hell. She’s saying, ‘He’s not one of us.’
And,
It’s not math anymore, it’s psychodrama. If she can’t have it, no one can have it. If she has to tear the party apart, she will.
Joe Conason wears kid gloves and pulls his punches writing for Salon today, but his jab still lands squarely on Clinton’s jaw:
She violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to ‘working, hard-working Americans, white Americans’ that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?
In The Washington Post today, Eugene Robinson tells the unvarnished truth:
Here’s what she’s really saying to party leaders: There’s no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you’ll be sorry.
And the upshot, according to Robinson:
Assuming that Obama is the eventual nominee, he will have some work to do in reuniting the party. But there’s no reason to think he won’t succeed — unless Clinton drives a wedge between important elements of the party’s historical coalition.
The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton has finally found a formula that can defeat Barack Obama, namely, exploiting deep psychological divisions between races and classes. The problem for Clinton is that, as Charles Krauthammer lucidly explains, she found the formula too late.
Why, then, does she persist in pursuing a strategy that can only divide her party and weaken its nominee?
Isn’t that Rush Limbaugh’s job?
May 9, 2008 at 9:20 am
hillary clinton is a dumb ass carpet muncher
May 9, 2008 at 9:42 am
Pardon my lack of sophistication, this campaign has gone on so long that neither of them knows what to say or how to say it. Ever watch children try to get the best of each other? Real issues are all but forgotten. We intelligent voters, if not already decided, have to vote for McCain.
May 9, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Why does she persist and weaken her party. Did she lie about being under fire in Bosnia? She just happened to have forgotten the red carpet treatment she received when she had arrived over there. The point is that she is an “OPPORTUNIST” who will say and do whatever it takes to get elected…
David Broder wrote on the 24th April, 2008 in an op-ed piece:-
“But in the seven weeks between Ohio and Pennsylvania, a Post poll found shockingly high percentages of voters who regard Clinton as dishonest and untrustworthy.”
Be it seven or ten weeks hence, there really is, quite objectively, something amiss in the character of Hillary Clinton,that not just the polls, Mr. Broder, or merely myself sense - it seems to be ” Clintonest opportunism”.The “nest” i suppose, is the perch in the White House to which she seeks to return. That many people support her cannot be denied - but, how Obama deals with her presence come the convention is now quite a challenge that obviously he can’t avoid nor easily escape.