Longform Links – Hillary Clinton Comment Fallout Edition

Washington Post – The Card Clinton is Playing

Lower-income white Democrats may well defect to John McCain in the fall if Obama is the nominee, Clinton is arguing, whereas African Americans — who have been choosing Obama by 9 to 1 — are going to vote for the Democratic nominee no matter what. Thus, she claims, she can better knit the party back together.

Let’s examine those premises. These are white Democrats we’re talking about, voters who generally share the party’s philosophy. So why would these Democrats refuse to vote for a nominee running on Democratic principles against a self-described conservative Republican? The answer, which Clinton implies but doesn’t quite come out and say, is that Obama is black — and that white people who are not wealthy are irredeemably racist.

The other notion — that Clinton could position herself as some kind of Great White Hope and still expect African American voters to give her their enthusiastic support in the fall — is just nuts. Obama has already won a majority of the Democratic primary contests; within a couple of weeks, he almost certainly will have won a majority of the pledged convention delegates and will be assured of finishing with more of the popular vote. Only in Camp Clinton does anyone believe that his supporters will be happy if party leaders tell him, in effect, “Nice job, kid, but we can’t give you the nomination because, well, you’re black. White people might not like that.”

Clinton’s sin isn’t racism, it’s arrogance. From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has refused to consider the possibility that Obama’s success was more than a fad. This was supposed to be Clinton’s year, and if Obama was winning primaries, there had to be some reason that had nothing to do with merit. It was because he was black, or because he had better slogans, or because he was a better public speaker, or because he was the media’s darling. This new business about white voters is just the latest story the Clinton campaign is telling itself about the usurper named Obama.

“It’s still early,” Clinton said Wednesday, vowing to fight on. At some level, she seems to believe the nomination is hers. Somebody had better tell her the truth before she burns the house down.

The New York Times – Sen. Clinton and the Campaign

There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process.

But we believe just as strongly that Mrs. Clinton will be making a terrible mistake — for herself, her party and for the nation — if she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with disturbing racial undertones. We believe it would also be a terrible mistake if she launches a fight over the disqualified delegations from Florida and Michigan.

Talking Points Memo – Pretty Black and White

Race has been the subtext of much of Hillary’s argument for her own electability. But now she’s thrown it right out there in the open: Obama can’t win because he’s black. Vote for me instead.

You don’t have to believe that Hillary’s a racist (I don’t) to conclude that a combination of the rigors of the campaign trail and her own powerful ambitions have clouded her judgment and curdled her spirit. It has certainly soured what had been a historic relationship between the Clintons and the black community.

Hers is not an appeal we’d tolerate from a Republican candidate, nor should we from a Democrat, no matter how sterling her progressive credentials might otherwise be.

Salon – Was Hillary Channeling George Wallace?

Citing an Associated Press analysis “that found how Senator 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,” she went on to say: “There’s a pattern emerging here.”

There is indeed a pattern emerging — and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

As Sean Wilentz and others have argued, there was no ugly subtext to her innocuous remark about the different roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson in the civil rights crusade, although several prominent Obama supporters promoted that smear. And if Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama and Jesse Jackson was badly timed and clumsy, that too fell within the bounds of acceptable commentary. Indeed, the discussion of ethnic and racial voting preferences is not only fair but unavoidable and utterly mundane in American politics.

But this time 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?

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans.” Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action. This is the grating sound of Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public.

New York Times – The Fight Stuff

Most telling line:

But while the commentators have been tut-tutting, Senator Clinton has been converting white males, assuring them that she’s come into their tavern not to smash the bottles, but to join the brawl.

Washington Post Stumped Blog – Drop Out Already, Hillary

The bigger reason I am not going to play your game is that I am tired of Clinton supporters trying to find some new formula, any formula, that could justify her continuation in the race, and would prevent those of us in the media from having to acknowledge that the fight is over (alas, no brokered convention, the el dorado for all political junkes), forcing us to go back to our miserable pre-primaries lives.

The Clinton quest for “new math” is getting comical. In a race that everyone understands is about accumulating delegates, she wants us to focus on anything but that metric. She’s won the big states! She’s carrying older states! She’s carrying the less-educated-whites vote! She’s doing well in hard-to-spell states! She’s carrying states where Obama was not on the ballot! She’d win in China! If you took the number of people who voted for each candidate and multiplied it by Pi, then attributed to Hillary all votes won by her husband in 1996, she would win!

Then there is the core hypocrisy at the heart of the Clinton campaign, a hypocrisy she cannot reconcile. She says she is still in this because she wants every last Democrat in every last state — including Michigan and Florida — to have his or her say. Then, when that glorious democratic process ends on the sunny isle of Puerto Rico, she wants to have superdelegates overturn the will of the people.