Hillary playing the race card - a look from the right & more

An interesting article today from Peggy Noonan, columnist for WSJ and a former special assistant to Ronald Reagan. She is looking from the outside in at the problem the Democratic Party is currently facing. We can no longer deny that there is an issue and it is made worse by the words coming from Hillary Clinton and her surrogates. Click on the link to read this article. it’s an interesting read from a former political insider. I think Peggy says a lot of things in this article that most Democrats are afraid to point out and sheds a light on the dilemma facing party elders and uncommitted superdelegates.

Damsel of Distress

excerpts:

The Democratic Party can’t celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.

…

Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “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.”

White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn’t say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.”

If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.

…

To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is — well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

“She has unleashed the gates of hell,” a longtime party leader told me. “She’s saying, ‘He’s not one of us.’”

She is trying to take Obama down in a new way, but also within a new context. In the past he was just the competitor. She could say, “All’s fair.” But now he’s the competitor who is going to be the nominee of his party. And she is still trying to do him in. And the party is watching.

Again: amazing.

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Finally, in something related - out of desperation, Clinton supporters have now gone to the length of threatening uncommitted/undeclared superdelegates. Sam Stein of Huffington Post reports on this damaging movement:

As the Democratic primary nears its long-awaited conclusion, undecided superdelegates have been drowned under a sudden deluge of angry, sometimes vicious emails from Hillary Clinton supporters urging them to not fall in line behind Barack Obama.

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In one exchange, Donna Brazille, Al Gore’s campaign manager and a stalwart of the Democratic Party, responded with frustration to a writer’s threats of defection. “Honestly, this is the 9th email today,” she wrote before 8:00 pm. “So I believe you’re ready to not only destroy Roe versus Wade, voting rights, civil liberties and civil rights. Perhaps adding trillions more to the deficits through non-stop tax cuts to the wealthy and 100 more years in Iraq. Yes, please join Rush and McCain asap. The train has left. Catch it.”

and a personal note from a red state superdelegate

“I spent my entire life in the two reddest states in the entire U.S. so please excuse me if I fail to discern the nuances of the arguments sent my way this evening in what appears to be an orchestrated campaign to intimidate the remaining unpledged delegates by threatening to leave the party and vote for a third Bush term if I and others like me don’t vote for Sen. Clinton,” wrote the exasperated superdelegate. “I have been uncommitted throughout this campaign because I wanted to see how the candidates performed in a variety of settings. I am proud of them both. But I am horrified by this effort to threaten votes for McCain if super delegates don’t vote for Sen. Clinton. I have received hundreds of emails from both sides - but I can say without exception that I have not received a single email from an Obama supporter that threatened a vote for McCain if I didn’t support Sen. Obama. You really ought to be ashamed.”

While the Clinton campaign claims ignorance, they must act to stop them. If she cares about the Democratic Party, if she cares about the country, if she really wants to see a progressive president, she must act now to stop her supporter from reacting and possibly defecting. She needs to get on the theme of unity and ask her supporters to regain their sanity. I know that she can’t control their actions, but she must come out against this type of aggressive actions from her supporters and not remain silent on their tactics.