Democracy for Vancouver

“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.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

No kidding. The “pattern” is that the further that brass ring drifts away from Clinton, the harder she drives in that racial wedge, particularly in states where there are just enough African Americans to scare the whites, but not enough to overcome, politically, the electoral effect of that bigotry.

From David Sirota’s article The Race Chasm:

[The] dip in Obama’s performance in states with a big-but-not-huge African-American population is the Race Chasm — and that chasm is no coincidence.
…
It is in the chasm where Clinton has defeated Obama. These are states from Ohio to Oklahoma to Massachusetts, where black-white racial politics are ingrained in the political culture but where the black vote is too small to offset a white vote racially motivated by the Clinton campaign. This chasm exists in states whose population is above 6 percent and below 17 percent black, and Clinton has won them by beating Obama among white working- class voters.
…
Clinton, knowing big wins in the Race Chasm can fortify her firewall, has subsequently intensified her efforts to inject race into the campaign.

And you’re going to exploit that Chasm all the way to the convention, aren’t you, miss white lady?

It’s Jesse Helms vs. Harvey Gantt all over again.