What I find most sad (and condescending) in Ferraro's remarks is how deliberate they feel.  I live on the boarder of Northeastern Pennsylvania.  Towns have lost families to the war, and for years have struggled through post-industrial depression.  Now, of course, we will all try to figure the place out and paint its people in words that ultimately condescend and dehumanize. 

But that's what Ferraro's remarks seem designed to do, too: pander to dehumanization.

Some time ago, the Democratic Party chose to stop discussing (if they ever had at all) how racism, sexism and classism work together to form hardship -- how group is pitted against group.   Instead, the party has triangulated, itself pitting group against group in clashes of competing outrage.

Senator Clinton's triangulation merely echoes this sorry history.  Through Ferraro's words, and a host of other racial quips Clinton has made or tolerated of late, she is targeting those in Pennsylvania who have been hit hard by the economy.

Instead of offering real answers or offering a perspective that would help us unite Democrats, she offers the old triangulation:

"You are in the straights you are in because of black people.  They are getting favored; you are getting dumped."

I hate to say it, but this strategy may just work.  White people I know believe this.  Even upper-middle class white people, often, on their first encounter with a black person who dares to talk or write about racism in any real way, will turn to that convenient Newspeak called, "reverse racism," and in private vent their anger at their sorry oppression.  God forbid anybody make us think about what it means to be white, particularly if we are privileged. 

But those without money, those who are really suffering economic hardship have a right to be angry.  However, it strikes me as tragic, deliberate, and almost unforgivable that Senator Clinton woos these people alternately with sighs of "I understand you" and (behind the symbolic closed doors created by the whispers of her surrogates) "We both know know it's the fault of black people, anyway."

Of course, this is tragic for African Americans in this country, who have clearly been cast aside by Senator Clinton as they have by almost everyone else.  It's also a tragedy for white women who can continue to outrage at their own litany of woes without understanding the complexities of prejudice and its brutal history.

(Do any of us recall that women's suffrage was originally sold in the South as being an agent to use against blacks?  Feminist leaders at the time told Southern whites that white women could help disenfranchise blacks further by simply adding to the white vote.  Then, too, there was the terrible power white women were given in the South -- perhaps their only power -- to kill a black man with only four words: "He looked at me.")

Triangulation is tragic, too, for those who are facing economic poverty, because it offers the poverty of division and prejudice over the richness of truth and constructive solutions.

Sad, sad, sad.

But very effective. 

Senator Clinton may sweep Pennsylvania with the margin of victory her husband says she needs, but she will do so at the cost of her own basic decency. 

I miss the person I thought she was.