working, hard-working Americans, white Americans

I'm hearing that as "hard-working Americans" are the same as "white Americans." No?

wtf?! When did that happen?

Now, nevermind the unintended irony that those with less education support Hillary, her comments by dividing up the electorate by race is exceedingly dangerous. Her campaign is sowing these seeds of mistrust throughout the media at present in a last, desperate attempt to help her win the nomination.

Dear clearthinker,

I know you will disagree with me, but I don't think Hillary is saying this to win the nomination. I'm willing to be wrong and I'm expecting to get ridiculed for saying it, but I think this is the party testing the Appalachian waters in WV and KY to see if voters will react positively or negatively to Obama as a GE candidate. A trial run for the GE, if you will. After WV and KY, Hillary will concede. Can't prove this, of course, but I will be watching for how the party leaders react to her comments.

Rec'd! If I wasn't an expat, I'd supply my state's list. Agreed it's time to do more than talk among ourselves about how bad this is.

Conscience. Shocked.

I read the article again, and I'm still disgusted. Here's the deal... the way "careful" politicians speak is very different from actual speech. The way "careful" politicians speak is generally grammatically incorrect, and largely incoherent. This has been much satirized in our culture, but I think the clearest recent example is Schwarzenegger's "all of these things." For example, he would be asked a question about something either politically inexpedient, or requiring complex thought; and since he is both expedient and incapable of complex thought, he would reply with one of his "and all of these things" sentence constructions. Let's say the question was something like "what is your stance on global warming?" And he might reply something like "with the oceans, and the scientists, and the disagreement, and the cars, and the future, and all of these things..." and maybe he'd eventually stumble on a period.

In this context, I understand Clinton's remark. It's one of those bullshit unending "sentences" with a ton of commas, no predicate, and no period. This type of PR speak is so new, that we don't even have an appropriate term for these sorts of mistakes-- Spoonerisms, Malapropisms, etc. But still, much like the Freudian slip, what makes this comment so absolutely damning, is that it is damning even sans parsing. It's repugnant to speak artfully about demographics, when you mean sexism. Racism. Ageism. Religious bigotry. Class warfare. This might be the most racist thing I have heard from a major Democratic figure-- ever.

Thanks for this post. I completely agree and am horrified. (What else does one say about racism?)My only suggestion is that we contact all representatives. Racism is an issue for all of us. I will call my representatives -- Schumer, Clinton and Hinchey -- today.

Yup: Clinton is mine.

I have to call her office to tell my Senator I am concerned about the racist comments of one of the political candidates who bares her name and who once resembled her.

Peace,

Laura

Good thought--Though I'd say your call ought to go out re/ all Congressional supporters of Clinton. There needs to be much more up-front confronting of the Clintons on their race-baiting, and a broad rejection of it. Too many party leaders are in denial, at least public denial, about this.

oh what nonsensical bleating....

on another note: I am a bit of an amateur ethnographer, and am passingly familiar with a few hundred distinct ethnic groups, and intimately with a few dozen. Today I saw a gypsy family, and I thought, oh, there is at least one ethnic group I regard more dimly than African-Americans. Mind you, I haven't yet been to Africa proper, so I am sure Hutus etc etc are even scarier and less worthy of respect, as groups anyway. But the gypsies are not loved by anybody in Europe, although I know several Americans who get all weepy because the Slovaks and Romanians aren't nice to them. Well, for good reason. A people who believe work is dishonorable, but that stealing is honorable? Believe me, not nice poeple to have as neighbors. At the other end of the spectrum would be Slovenes. Polite, educated, cosmopolitan, gracious, disinclined to violence, and athletic to boot. Serbs are are also great people, a lot more outgoing than the Slovenes, but when they congregate in a crowd they tend to start jabbering like monkeys (see "Kovoso"). Greeks are overly haughty, and to dumb to realize they are just hellenized Slavs, and any people that cheer when foreign diplomats are assasinated doesn't get my high regard. You see, broad generalizations about different groups of people can be reasonably made. And unfortunately, African-Americans are just not very nice, broadly speaking. Although I will not that Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans can be pretty nasty much of the time, oh and American Jews are by and large a disgraceful bunch. Entirely unlike Israeli Jews, at least the kind who serve in the military, and not the fruitcake settler type.

This is ridiculous. Her remarks are about class, not race. Obama is an upper middle class white boy. Have you ever heard him use the N-Word? That means he is either white and/or educated. In this country such a person can't be in the lower class, or the working class.

Hillary is only pointing to the fact that upper middle class white men can't be elected president -- unless they are running against a white upper middle class man and they are really rich.

If you go to Doris Matsui's website you will notice her support for Hillary came with a promise from Hillary to appoint her to a committee supporting Asian interests. I wrote to her earlier in the campaign when Hillary started her "kitchen sink" tactics. I acknowledged her personal concerns regarding Asian interests and that she came out in support for Hillary before the California primary. But I asked her to reconsider her endorsement. Sacramento County voted by a slim margin for Obama. This did not move her. She did not respond to my e-mail. In fact other e-mails to her have been very disappointing. The responses I have received have been standard form letters that did not address me personally. Today I will call her office to give them my piece of mind. I will remind her that Democrats are the big tent, welcoming to all races, that must speak out loudly against skin tone prejudices. I have been extremely upset by the Clintons race baiting. The media narrative from their camp has been "we cannot win the White House without appealing to ignorant lower class white bigots". Rather than informing these voters of the error in their thinking she promotes it to the party's detriment.

These guys are all over it:

http://www.americablog.com/

Slightly off topic, but.... "your help required" - I love this line. This is what we've been missing since 9/12/2001. The next 4 years will be about getting everyone on board to right this ship.

You know I cannot make up my mind as to what she's really doing here.

Is she putting down the high school educated white voter as dimwits who can be suckered into vote for her,

or

if she is channeling the anger of white, low information and low income voter against the black candidate and the black folk who have surged to his candidacy. You know, the low income non-white people who compete with low income white voters for their jobs?

The same argument that Paul Begala was spouting and the ubiquitous and dogged Lanny Davis on Tues night. I noted, specifically, Begala's disgust at "egg-heads and AA" voters.

What kind of ads are we going to see in WV and KY if this is Clinton's theme going into those states? Will she invoke something akin to the Jesse Helms "hands" strategy?

Seriously, I'm starting to wonder how far she is going to go with this.

Nothing has changed in the Clinton strategy after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, except that it has become more blatant.

Yes, and it's become so blatant that the superdelegates and Party leaders should feel very comfortable denouncing overt racial division by a Democratic candidate. That's not what this party stands for. Where the hell are the superdelegates?

Nice. lots of double meanings can be read into it.

The low income, low information white voter is the only group that has not wholly abandoned her. The AA have left her, the eggheads have left her, and many of the white, low income have also jumped ship. A significant portion, however, has not and she's making sure they stick to her as she undergoes another morphing and becomes their champion.

I hope Obama fights hard in WV and KY.

Once upon a time, being a liberal white American meant accepting that African-Americans get a seat at the table. Being an assertive liberal meant insisting on that seat. Maybe even discovering that Latinos should be included, too.

Now, being an American means we arrive at every table looking forward to meeting someone new. Even if the folks who show up that day are all "white," we want to find out who's bringing deviled eggs, who's bringing the tofu stir-fry, and who's got something we've never tried before.

I don't think Senator Clinton meant that non-white Americans aren't hard-working. I think she revealed a different assumption. It's the idea that white Americans are the regular Americans, so it's odd to have to mention their whiteness.

She knows, cerebrally, about a nation built on diversity. She doesn't know it below the conscious level, where her emotions and reflexes operate. And when she's very tired, the intellectual commitment loses out to the deeper understanding.

It's okay to have some folks like that still around. We're supposed to keep talking to them, helping them change, loving them even if they never really get make the big adjustment to a fully shared country.

But no one talks about my country that way gets my vote.