Puh-leassse.
Thursday, May 8th, 2008“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. (USA Today)
Latoya Peterson over at Racialicious has a great analysis of this comment. It’s true that Clinton has some (marginal?) advantage amongst white working class voters. That means she may be better qualified to compete for the white, working class vote in the general election. If that’s all she was trying to say, I think it’d be a pretty uncontroversial comment.
But that’s not the conclusion she is trying to reach. She is trying to make a point about the breadth of her coalition and therefore her electability as compared to Obama’s. As Peterson points out:
It doesn’t matter that Barack has more delegates and Clinton and Obama are neck and neck in the popular vote. No, fuck that. He still isn’t electable. The white vote is important, but it is not a monolith. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Obama will lose white votes (despite showing more than respectable numbers) and that alone should show us that he’s not electable. (Latoya Peterson)
Peterson also points to this quote from dnA over at Too Sense, which I think sums up Clinton’s intentions (conscious or not) quite well:
This kind of comment is less a description than an agitator, it’s meant to give white voters the impression that they would be “disenfranchised” by an Obama win. It’s a not so subtle effort to evoke racial resentment over Obama’s success. (dnA)