A day after her hoped-for monster triumph in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries fizzled, Sen. Hillary Clinton no longer seemed to care whom she offended. She dared to speak about race and gender in public with the candid language that even political consultants usually keep private.
Despite losing big to Sen. Barack Obama in North Carolina's Democratic primary and barely squeaking out a victory in Indiana, she said in an interview with USA Today that "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on."
And who might that "broader base" be? She cited an Associated Press story "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking 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. Yes, there is a pattern here and it's not a very pretty one. When Mrs. Clinton is implying out loud that her opponent's supporters are not hardworking enough, white enough or undereducated enough, it's hardly a high point in her campaign.
But the former first lady rejected the notion that her comments were racially divisive. "These are the people you have to win, if you're a Democrat, in sufficient numbers to actually win the election," she said. "Everybody knows that."
She has a point. Exit polls in Indiana and North Carolina showed her beating Mr. Obama among white voters, particularly white men, and voters who lack college degrees.
She won about 60 percent of the white vote in both states, down from the 65 percent of the white vote she won in the Ohio primary on March 4 and the 63 percent she received in Pennsylvania on April 22. She is expected to do well in today's primary in overwhelmingly white West Virginia.
Black voters, by contrast, turned out 9-1 for Mr. Obama in Indiana and North Carolina, which is close to the black turnout for Democratic presidential candidates in recent decades. Some white bloggers see some veiled form of black supremacy in that turnout. They might have a case among those who choose not to remember how hard Mr. Obama had to work to woo black voters away from Mrs. Clinton before his South Carolina primary victory.
