The following is an exchange that took place yesterday on CNN's show "American Morning" between Rep. Loretta Sanchez of California and Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey.  The show is hosted by John Roberts.

This is yet more indication of the Clinton campaign's strategy to highlight and reinforce the racial divide in the Democratic party and then to point to that divide as evidence that Obama is the weaker candidate.  This kind of retrograde talk is both highly insulting to those "types of people" that Sanchez refers to (because it condescendingly assumes that their political views are determined by their race or ethnicity) and highly corrosive to our political discourse generally.  If a white Republican Congressman had made such comments on national television, they would have received tremendous scrutiny and been widely condemned.  Yet there has not been a peep about this yet. 

Enough is enough. 
  

ROBERTS: So why can't he win West Virginia in a general election?


SANCHEZ: I don't believe that he will win West Virginia.


(CROSSTALK)


SANCHEZ: I don't believe that he might. I think Florida, if we don't count the delegates from Florida, I think we run into a big problem. All Democrats run into a big problem. I think Ohio is a problem. I think when you look at the largest base of the Democratic Party, women and quite frankly Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Irish-American type of people, I don't think that he has convinced those types of people that they would vote for him.


ROBERTS: Final word, Congressman Payne.


PAYNE: He will win Florida, he will win Ohio, he will win Pennsylvania, and with that in the state that were won by Senator Kerry, he's the president of the United States, and that's going to be what's going to happen in November.


ROBERTS: We'll see. Congressman Payne, Congresswoman Sanchez, thanks for being with us this morning. Appreciate you coming in. Good to have you here.


Transcript here:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/13/ltm.03.html