Hillary Clinton's campaign has a serious race problem -- specifically, a Palmore v. Sidoti problem, that is coming to infect the way we look at race in the Democratic Party.  This piece explains the danger, and what we should do about it. 
 
Palmore is the 1982 Supreme Court case in which two white parents separated, and the white mother began cohabiting with a black man.  Florida took primary custody from her because a social worker opined that being a child in an interracial household could injure the child, because of societal prejudices.  The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, because, it held, it violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution to give effect to the racial prejudices of persons outside the family.  By giving effect to the racial prejudices of certain whites, the Clinton campaign has a Palmore v. Sidoti problem.  Decent people should recoil from it.
 
My argument is simple:  there is a huge moral distinction between passively accepting the votes of whites reluctant or unwilling to vote for a black man (which cannot, in practice, be avoided by a white candidate running against a black candidate), and encouraging that vote, or privileging those reluctant and unwilling voters.  The Clinton campaign jumped this shark months ago, has indeed produced a coherent Democratic "white vote," and responsible people, or people who want the Democratic Party to comprise a lasting majority in our politics cannot support it.
 
The racial markers are well-known and too numerous to ignore:  (1) Bill raising Jesse Jackson in a non-sequitur response to a question as to why it took two Clintons to defeat Obama; (2) the Clinton campaign leaking "Dressed Obama" to Matt Drudge, according to Matt Drudge, a leak corroborated by the Clinton campaign's boasting of a steady, leaking tie to Drudge through Clinton staffer Tracy Sefl (see NYT, 10/22/07, J. Rutenberg, "Clinton Learns To Play Along With Drudge,"; (3) Clinton herself saying on 60 Minutes that Obama was not Muslim "as far as I know;" (4) challenging as insufficient Obama's rejection of Louis Farrakhan; (5) Clinton pollster Sergio Bendixen telling The New Yorker that many Hispanics would not vote for a black candidate, and Clinton herself declining to disavow that statement when pressed in the Las Vegas debate about whether it was her campaign's official position, affirming it as a "historical statement," and (6) the rash of surrogates engaging in race-baiting and signification:  (a) Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, Hillary's chief ally in that state, saying some whites there were not ready to vote for a black man; (b) Bob Kerrey's use of Obama's middle name and claiming that he attended a "secular madrassa," when that word implies Muslim terror training and with it the Manchurian candidate theme; and (c) Andrew Cuomo's statement that in Iowa and New Hampshire retail politicking, one cannot "shuck and jive" at press conferences.
 
There is indisputably a set of white voters, even within the Democratic Party, uncomfortable with black political power.  Their views were clear in exit polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where 16% by one account in Ohio, and 15% by another account in Pennsylvania, of white voters considered race as an important factor in their voting.  Three-quarters of these voters chose Clinton over Obama.  Whatever the baseline level of this phenomenon is, it is not zero, and it is not trivial.
 
However, there is an obvious counterbalance:  Obama is reaping percentages of black votes (91% in Wisconsin, 92% in Pennsylvania) historically associated with white Democrats running against Republicans.  These voters are less numerous in all but a handful of eastern states; and their voting correlates very highly to their race.  In a state in which 12% or more of black voters vote, and split 90/10, their 11/1 split counterbalances a 12/3 split among the 15% of white voters admitting they voted based upon race.
 
The Palmore v. Sidoti question is what to do with it -- whether to ratify or reject the bigotries at the margins of our voting culture.  The Clinton campaign's answer, after Ohio, and especially Pennsylvania, was the talking point that we must look at the voters who Obama cannot win.  We must examine who did not vote for him.  The white blue collar worker, we are told, will not accept Obama.  In essence, the Clinton campaign has argued, just like Florida did in Palmore, that it's not against interracial families, it's just acknowledging that others are -- here, the idea being that it's not bad that Barack is black, it's merely that some voters in crucial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania think it is, and we can't leave this election to the chance that they might not come along with Obama.
 
This is not an acceptable form of argument in the Democratic Party.  We must, in internet parlance, call bullshit on it, for several reasons.
 
First, the Clinton campaign's implied Palmore argument does not say, nor can it, that Obama cannot win the general election.  Some voters say they won't vote for a woman (12%), others won't vote for a black man (5%).  Far more admit that they will not vote for a Mormon (20%), or a gay person (50% or so) for President.  But, you say, the Presidency is not an entitlement that can be litigated over, like one's rights to equal protection, so we must be pragmatic.  You are exactly right.  The difference among these prejudices is that, while in today's America a gay Presidential candidate, for example, would be doomed by prejudice, we have just determined experimentally that a black candidate is capable of winning the majority of delegates in the Democratic Party's process.  So even if one considers it fair to the party to take account of bigotries in picking general election candidates, bigotry should only be acknowledged if it overbears so greatly as to make a candidate not viable.  Being black hasn't done that for Obama.  If he can win -- if racialisms even roughly offset here -- all Americans, but especially the party of gender and racial justice should stand squarely against its spread.
 
Second, the gross hypocrisy of the Democratic Party crediting white racial bigotry, or even tolerating crediting it, is ridiculous in this case.   For one thing, the Democratic Party elected Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and arguably, Al Gore, based upon roughly 90% black support and roughly 40% of white support, one would think the Democratic Party would go far out of its way to treat fairly its most significant black candidate in the history of the party, as by squelching these subtle and not so subtle appeals to white racial solidarity.  On a pragmatic basis alone, the Democratic Party should avoid pissing in the well of its most loyal group of supporters.  One could imagine a Democratic Party leadership, and a competitor to Senator Obama, denouncing every single one of the statements and signifiers numbered in the above paragraph.  And this has not occurred. 
 
That it has not occurred is ridiculous, because Barack Obama is self-evidently one of the most significant political figures in African-American history, and since he took the large pledged delegate lead in February, has been likely to become perhaps the most significant after Dr. King by virtue of his likely and nearly inevitable nomination.  Consider other figures on this stage:  Martin Luther King stands among the forefront of all American political figures for his civil rights leadership.  W.E.B. DuBois, among many other distinctions, cofounded the NAACP.  Thurgood Marshall was the first black Supreme Court justice.  Our nation, which also until recently wouldn't let blacks manage sporting teams in leagues with massive black populations, has pitifully elected only five black Senators in its history -- two in Reconstruction-era Mississippi, Ed Brooke in Massachusetts in 1967 and 1973, Carol Moseley Braun in Illinois in 1992 and Barack Obama in 2004.
 
Can anyone reasonably dispute that the first black person nominated for President would have to be one of the most significant black political figures in American history, and potentially the most significant?  That should have counted for more in the Democratic Party than it has.  Howard Dean, Bill Clinton (were he not perpetrating part of it and not married to a protagonist), Al Gore, and others, should have policed the racial dialogue in this race.  They have not, and near its close, we have been treated to weeks of the media tape-looping Jeremiah Wright's roof-lifting to rural white America, to tell the Jerry Springer truth that some rural white folk don't like them blacks.
 
The good news is, there is less truth in that than there ever has been, and Barack Obama's candidacy is historic and game-changing whether you vote for Clinton, McCain, or Kodos.  It proves what can be.  And while Hillary Clinton was going to receive the votes of whites who would not vote for a black man anyway, the fact is that her campaign has gone after those votes, which is morally altogether different and worse.  It did so as the campaign devolved to "cultural issues," with Clinton's spinners pausing oh-so-thoughtfully over the question of whether, after Wright and Hillary's appeals to bowling, shots, and every other proxy for gritty whiteness -- and Hillary going on O'Reilly to get asked about Wright again, since it's unseemly just to bring it up -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, and white America will vote for Obama. 
 
This is the Clintons' Palmore v. Sidoti problem.  It allows the speaker to pretend that he or she is not racist by having a reluctance to support Obama, that we're just showing concern about whether he's "electable" -- a concern over prejudices other people harbor, not that we do.  If you doubt this, check the New York Times' poll today -- most don't care about Wright, but they think other voters do.  This is the frame the Clintons have built (even though Obama through most of the year has polled stronger against McCain than Clinton). 
 
We have to tear down that frame.  Palmore was rightly decided -- giving effect to the real or imagined racism of others is simply, and equally, racist.  So it is in this race.  We need to vote our consciences, and call bullshit on appeals to respect the newly venerated white bloc within the Democratic Party, and call bullshit on every racial signifier we see.  Our consciences, and our debt as Democrats to our black partners in the progressive project, without whom there would never have been a President Clinton, demand nothing less.