Pathetic: Hillary Plays the White Voter Card

As part of her continuing campaign for the 2012 nomination and her campaign to elect John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton is closing her sad campaign acting like a right-wing Republican with the latest and most offensive example of race-card attacks.

Possibly because she is tired and letting her guard down, possibly out of sheer desperation combined with blind ambition, Hillary Clinton openly talks about “white people.” Bill Clinton speaks to white audiences about “voters like you.” Paul Begala says Democrats can’t win with only intellectuals and African-Americans. Paul Krugman graces The New York Times with his wisdom about the white vote.

This is an incredibly low road end to an embarrassing and failed campaign that began when the coronation of the Clintons ended, and they sent forth surrogates such as Billy Shaheen in New Hampshire and a lineup of others with a succession of low-road, low-ball, low-content attacks.

It has failed, it will fail, and the real story of 2008 is how Barack Obama has maintained his dignity, his honor, his calmness and his leadership in the face of such an intense, organized, systematic campaign of personal destruction of the kind I cannot remember any major Democrat running against other Democrat for president.

Listening to the rhetoric of Team Clinton in the last 48 hours, we are witnessing a sad throwback to the politics of the pre-New South South. What is amazing is how thoroughly it has been rejected.

Soon, this ends. Soon, we turn the page. Soon, there will be talk of historic voter registration with the new campaign that begins this Saturday. Soon, there will be talk of 2 million Obama donors that will become 3 million. Soon, there will be talk of possible Obama vice presidents and a new chapter in American history.

For now, let us say of this last sad stand of the bad loser in this interminable campaign what Shakespeare wrote: Out, damned spot.