rivka

Apparently we aren't even bothering to use codewords for race anymore:

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."

"Working, hard-working Americans, white Americans." As opposed, apparently, to the shiftless welfare queens of color who support Barack Obama. That's as naked a play of the race card as anyone ever pinned on Al Sharpton. Hillary Clinton, supposedly a Democrat, is pinning the last desperate hopes of her campaign on white racists.

This is not her pastor speaking. This is not a guy in her neighborhood who did bad things forty years ago. This is not a random white guy she's tenuously connected to. This is Hillary Clinton herself taking a page out of the John Birch Society's playbook: "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans."

I've never been a Hillary Clinton fan, but at the beginning of this campaign I admired her historic candidacy and was delighted to be able to say that I'd be happy to throw my full support behind whichever Democratic candidate won the nomination. That was before Clinton refused to say, when asked, that Barack Obama was not a Muslim. That was before she justified her ridiculous bread-and-circuses pandering about a gas tax repeal by sneering that "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," and "We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

"Elite opinion" is a Newt Gingrich phrase. It's part of the frame that the Republicans have successfully used to marginalize Democrats for the past 14 years. It's all one piece with the race-baiting attempts to position "hard-working Americans" and African-Americans on opposite sides: both are strategies that could've come right out of the hard right wing playbook. Hillary Clinton is deliberately making use of these strategies. There is no question - none - that she doesn't know what she's doing. And by doing so, she is reinforcing themes and frames which benefit the hard right wing and hurt the Democratic Party.

Obviously no matter what happens I'm not going to vote for McCain. But if Hillary Clinton somehow manages to come out of this disgusting, ugly mess with the nomination, I won't be donating one penny to her campaign, making one phone call, or handing out one campaign flyer.

I am so. Utterly. Disgusted.

Via Atrios.