As a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire (now Congo) in the 1970s, I noticed that kids picked mangos before they ripened.  Mangos do not ripen well off the branch so this amounted to wasting them.  When I asked the kids why they did this, they said, that "if they didn't, someone else would."

I heard a similar story on XM Radio channel 130's Beyond the Beltway show on Sunday night.  A Hispanic American woman from Texas who had just returned from a long trip to PA and IN where she worked for Hillary, said that she could not possibly support Obama and that she would launch a Latinas for McCain group if Obama became the Democratic nominee.  When asked why, she did not hesitate to say that "If he won, then Hispanics would be on the bottom".  Prodded on by the panel that included a supporter of each candidate including McCain, she added that "they don't want to work".

Obviously this is just one ignorant voice, but in looking at the likely outcome in West Virginia today and Kentucky next week, it is pretty demoralizing.  Republicans have little to worry about as long as they can rely on working class Americans to value ethnicity over economics.

I post this not to demoralize any Obama supporters - I am one - but to remind everyone that we have an even steeper mountain to climb in the general election than we have had in these primaries.  We still have a lot of hearts and minds to reach before November.  We must waste no time in doing so.