You know, just when I thought Sen. Clinton realized she had been decisively beaten, and thus that it was time to beg off and let the healing begin, we get garbage like this: With West Virginia and Kentucky on the docket (and no more sizable African-American populations left on the calendar), Clinton toys dangerously with the race card yet again. “‘I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,’ she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article ‘that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.’” Uh, riiiight. Because, as we all know, black Americans aren’t hard-working at all, but rather “shiftless” and “indolent.” “There’s a pattern emerging here.” That there is, Sen. Clinton, and your campaign seems to be on the wrong side of it.
I get it — She was probably trying to make the same old point about her support among the white working class, and for whatever reason it came out disastrously wrong and inadvertently (I hope) conflated white and hard-working. But, even allowing for an unfortunate gaffe, this riff further illustrates the Clinton campaign’s troubling penchant for denigrating African-American votes as less important than those of white folk. Simply put, they’re not — a vote is a vote is a vote, and Obama has more of them, eggheads, African-Americans, you name it. Nor do I agree with the dubious contention that white working-class voters who have backed Clinton in the primary will go for McCain in the general en masse. As I said here, when it comes to primaries and generals, we’re talking apples and oranges. Past performance is no indicator of future success, or failure.
Working hard’s all fine and good, but maybe there’s a reason all those Hillary voters didn’t finish college, other than a lack of financial aid. Oh shit, there I go being an elitist again
and yet those white working class Dems (and white working class Non-Dems) have a historic tendency to stray from the Dem nominee…1968 being the classic example, with Alabama Gov. Wallace on the ballot, he pulled enough white working class votes (what we later called Reagan Dems) in the North and Midwest, such that the election was snatched from Humphrey and tipped to Nixon….espec. by reviewing the voter data in Missouri, Ohio and Maryland, Wallace pulled enough votes that would have gone to HHH, and instead went to Wallace, such that Nixon carried those states…. and the pattern then came up again and again, in the elections of Reagan, and Bush Two…. so, altho HRC may have said it very inartfully, what she said has a very big grain of truth to it….just look at the historic patterns of how white working class Dems stray from the Dem nominee in the genl. election, almost like the guy who has too much beeer and flirts with his old high school flame at the 30th anniversary reunion while the wife is watching from the sidelines, these folks can be very fickle, as the history shows….
you bounced my comment-too bad it was a good one
Not sure where your comment went, Jim, but I didn’t delete it, nor was it in the queue. Your browser must’ve ate it…sorry.