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Hillary's 3/5 Strategy

I was going to be nice.  "No more Hillary bashing for me," I said.  I thought, "This thing is over, so why not be more Obamalike."  But then, I read this:

Garin: Clinton won the white vote

The Clinton campaign conference starts on a deliberately high note:
Howard Wolfson notes, cheerily, that it's a beautiful day in Arlington.

Geoff Garin talks about Indiana, "a close outcome, but an outcome about which we feel very, very good."



"The Chicago media market ended up representing over 20% of the state,"
he says. He also says the campaign made "progress" in North Carolina.

And Garin brags, specifically and explicitly, about her strength
with the white vote, comparing North Carolina's white voters in North
Carolina to those in Virginia. (The conversations have always been
about these voters, but they're usually referred to as "blue collar" or
by some less specifically racial euphemism.)

"We lost the white electorate in Virginia, started even in North
Carolina among the white electorate just two weeks ago, and ended
[with] a  very significant win of 24 points among those voters," he
said, acknowledging that among black voters, Clinton "did not do as
well as we would want or need."

Wolfson, describing the same voters as "blue collar," said they're a
"key swing vote" and reiterated Clinton's case for electability.

They're bracing, no doubt, for a series of questions in which reporters tell them, in various ways, that the race is over.


There strategy now amounts to nothing less than saying that African-American votes count as 3/5 of a vote.  They aren't as "valuable" as those white votes.  They aren't even being sneaky about playing the race card any more.  This is why I hope on everything good that Obama does not take her as VP.  I have lost the very little empathy I had left for her campaign.  They continue to prey upon our worst instincts, while Obama continues to appeal to our best.


Comments (44)

No I agree they have gotten increasingly overt with this. Her whole campaign is aimed at this one thing - he can't win because he's black - and I can.

That's her argument and it's really stinks. I was really hoping she'd give it up but all signs are that she won't.


It's just disgusting.

I agree that it's disgusting. Freaked out about it earlier.

But I've calmed down.

They're using the racial argument because it's the only one they've got left. Absolutely the only one. True, it would be better to say nothing than to say this sort of divisive cr*p. But pity has become a more appropriate response than anger.

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Those types of analogies show why so many African Americans defected from the Clinton Campaign after being supporters. What they should have added to their press conference is that if the nomination is unfairly wrestled away from Obama, the largest category of swing voters will be African Americans who will leave the Democratic Party in record numbers.

Hillary Clinton plays the woman card a helluva lot more than Obama plays the race card. And yet polls are never broken down via sex to anywhere near the level the media focuses on race. It's quite disturbing actually - nothing but a bunch of race baiters.

I mean she's at a fund raiser tonight dubed the 'Generations of Women for Hillary' - Could Obama get away with a 'Generations of African Americans for Barack' fund raiser without it becoming a huge MSM issue and certain segments of the population crying bloody murder?

I would be willing to wager that women who voted for Hillary almost solely because she is a woman outnumbered the votes cast for Obama by African Americans just because he is black.

Great point. I wondered the same thing. Nope. There's no way Obama would have gotten away with that, unless McCain and Clinton were invited too.

Let's leave aside, for a minute, the point both of you make about Obama being able to "get away with" similar things. The point you make that I think is the really solid one, is how "polls are never broken down via sex to anywhere near the level the media focuses on race." 100% agreed. Such a good point.


Here's my larger point-- we should tolerate neither! We should no longer tolerate "demographics" as an acceptable euphemism for any form of prejudice, be it sexism, racism, age prejudice, class prejudice, religious prejudice, etc. Just as we no longer tolerate sitting on the fence on issues of racism, and rush to condemn its proponents; in the same way, we must rush to condemn the tactic of hiding behind demographics in order to preach prejudice.

"we should tolerate neither! We should no longer tolerate "demographics" as an acceptable euphemism..."

...can I second that motion?

Very well put, this needs to be thoroughly discussed and dissected for future campaigns. It would be hard to create a legal guide that prevented this type of prejudiced prognostication by-the-numbers (better, prognistacation by the prejudiced numbers) but we can establish a sandard of some sort that, at least, exposes the game when it is being played.

I'll third (or fourth or fifth) that notion. Excellent point.

I'm hoping some of Clinton's supporters come in here and defend this, like its a perfectly reasonable statement to make. That would be interesting.

Really, it's Obama's fault. He played the race card. If he hadn't been black in the first place, the Clintons never would have had to do any of this.

Yeah - shoulda chosen his father a lot more carefully...

Since it's clear his Presidential ambitions started before conception...

Don't forget, we have evidence that he's been plotting at least since kindergarten, who knows what he was doing before he was born. He's black, dontcha know?

Well, you know, scientific research shows that if you have children, there's a very large probability your parents did as well...

i've read the percentage is > 90%

You know, "Studies show" or "there is research" is such an empty rhetorical advice. I mean you can say "studies show" anything. Show me the study, Clear thinker...

Personally, I can't wait for the day the Clinton camp argues to count the popular vote from Puerto Rico, but not Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine (as these "undemocratic" caucus states don't keep a vote count). Never mind that Puerto Rico isn't a state. That is, unless she loses it... then it won't count.

In California, there are a number of representatives who are not white who have endorsed Hillary Clinton. It would be refreshing for them to "reject and denounce" her comments publicly.

Here is the list:

CA-5: Doris Matsui Japanese (born in an Interment Camp!

CA-32: Hilda Solis Latina

CA-33: Diane Watson Black

CA-34: Lucille Roybal-Allard Latina

CA-35: Maxine Waters Black

CA-37: Laura Richardson Biracial (like Obama)

CA-38: Grace Napolitano Latina

CA-43: Joe Baca Latino

CA-47: Loretta Sanchez Latina

It's time for these people to call Hillary out on comments like this. Their constituents should urge them on to that mission.

The conference call set me off as well, in a major way. I found it unbelievable that they would brag so blatantly about their success in driving a wedge between white voters and Obama. To hear later that Clinton is considering 'requesting' the VP slot, and that she is staying in the race to "negotiate" a spot on the ticket - my God that's disturbing. Yet this is the only place I've found any sense of outrage about it. Thanks for posting.

This has set me off too. I am so angry right now.

Rec'd!

Crikey ... the VP slot is the winner's to offer. Don't tell me that's up for a rethink now as well ... [bangs head against desk]

Geraldine Ferraro, would you like to comment on BuckeyeMike's blog?

I'm sure you have some interesting opinions on this...

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oh quit hyperventilating.

on another note: I am a bit of an amateur ethnographer, and am passingly familiar with a few hundred distinct ethnic groups, and intimately with a few dozen. Today I saw a gypsy family, and I thought, oh, there is at least one ethnic group I regard more dimly than African-Americans. Mind you, I haven't yet been to Africa proper, so I am sure Hutus etc etc are even scarier and less worthy of respect, as groups anyway. But the gypsies are not loved by anybody in Europe, although I know several Americans who get all weepy because the Slovaks and Romanians aren't nice to them. Well, for good reason. A people who believe work is dishonorable, but that stealing is honorable? Believe me, not nice poeple to have as neighbors. At the other end of the spectrum would be Slovenes. Polite, educated, cosmopolitan, gracious, disinclined to violence, and athletic to boot. Serbs are are also great people, a lot more outgoing than the Slovenes, but when they congregate in a crowd they tend to start jabbering like monkeys (see "Kovoso"). Greeks are overly haughty, and to dumb to realize they are just hellenized Slavs, and any people that cheer when foreign diplomats are assasinated doesn't get my high regard. You see, broad generalizations about different groups of people can be reasonably made. And unfortunately, African-Americans are just not very nice, broadly speaking. Although I will not that Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans can be pretty nasty much of the time, oh and American Jews are by and large a disgraceful bunch. Entirely unlike Israeli Jews, at least the kind who serve in the military, and not the fruitcake settler type.

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You have convinced me. I am now a racist.

Congrats.

The creeps in her campaign are crawling out of the woodwork, they are the only ones left who are shameless enough to spin this so casually.

Watch as the worst rats refuse to leave their sinking ship, for one simple reason... no one will allow them to board another vessel. The "good rats" have already found another floatilla to inhabit, but these rattiest of rats have no refuge, so they are desperate to keep their sinking ship afloat, whatever the consequences are to the whole fleet.

They have burnt every bridge they might have crossed to find solid ground, and so they wait in the last dry hold, scurrying furiously from wall to wall as the water leaks into their once-protected realm.

An apt metaphor, JEP07, with a lot of power to explain why the Clinton campaign becomes more and more toxic as the ship is sinking.

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My favorite part was the "Swing State", very important, change maker status of West Virginia. No offense WV but how can Wolfson make such statements without all the reporters busting into hysterics.

I dont think the clinton campaign is trying to play the race card here.

I think there just about down to their last excuse as to why they should stay in. Trust me, if it wasn't working whites, it would have been somebody else:

Obama cant win women over 78 who shop at walmart every thursday.

Or

Obama doesn't do well among voters who have white dogs with brown spots on their back.

or

Obama cant win the majority of left handed voters whose favorite color is neon purple.

I'm actually giving the Clinton campaign the benefit of the doubt on this one.(i know! the even I can't believe i wrote that) They're desperate and they're clinging to whatever it is they have to cling to to stave off electoral death as long as possible. but trust me, the life support is running out and sooner rather than later, the plug will be pulled.

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i am ashamed to be latina and every hrc supporter who is a person of color should be outraged at her audacity to suggest that only white voters count. my only guess is these supporters owe her political favors. the voters need to make sure they all lose their seats when they are up for reelection-every last one of them. america is too colorful to allow this myopic way of thinking!

shame on you hillary clinton. shame on me for having the nerve to pity you the other night.

i am sick of the way you make it ok for whites for be racist under the guise of electibility and then you sit back and say whites wont vote for obama. here is news, this latina and many more won't vote for you and it is already a given that the majority of blacks won't either. it may not be a big deal for you now, b/c you wont be the nominee anyway, but should you harbor hopes for future office, you are doomed and good riddance!

this country was built on the backs of people of color. it is high time you stop taking non-whites for granted. i am just ashamed that hispanics are too dumb for realize that they are being used by the likes of you and when we are no longer needed, you will dump us all the way you did aways with the Blacks.

It's all just further proof that Hillary is running as a Republican.

Superdelegates need to shut her down.

She's running as a Dixiecrat.

ARGH!

WENCH HILLARY SEES ACTION!

YE ALL SEE FRACTIONS!

MY HOW YOU TWIST THE WORDS!

SHE SPEAKS WITH A HOLLER!

TO SUPPORTERS BLUE COLLAR!

WHILE OBAMAS ARE ALL TECH NERDS!

GRAB ME THE WENCH HILLARY! SHE'LL BRING BACK CORPORATE RAIDING 1990S!

ACQUIRE! MERGE! MARAUD! DILUTE! DILUTE!

ARGH!

Will somebody please explain to me the idea of "blue collar" meaning white? As opposed to the black voters who are elitist white collars? Or are they "no collar" voters? I apologize for not having the direct quote, but I heard a Hillary supporter on tv the other day say that her success with the blue collar white voters shows that she is standing for the "little people." Or maybe it was the Obama is not standing for the "little people." I was just thinking, why are black voters not little people? And this whole post is making me sick even though I am writing it... even after all these months the racist issues in this primary can be shocking.

And on a non racial note, why is it that sometimes in this campaign I feel that I am being accused of being less than American because I have a college degree.

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AM
You are supposed to be hypnotized by now and with that elitist college degree you may think for yourself. Notice the Bush followers......they live on sound bites not readable news.

The part I don't get is why are all those white folks in Montana and SD and Wisconsin and Iowa are able to vote for BO yet no one seems to notice. Are we not working class folks? I haven't seen too many limos in SD or Montana and Wisconsin drives lots of Detroit trucks. The stats only work in Ohio and Penn but MSM seems to generalize it to the whole country.

Yes, thinking for oneself is dangerous.

I heard something yesterday about how it is the totally white states that went for Obama. The states with a more mixed population and therefore "racial tension" had the white voters more for Hillary. I sort of vaguely... out of the small part of my brain that was able to listen to that without throwing something at the tv.... thought that was supposed to mean that if you have never actually met a black person then you don't know that you are supposed to dislike them.

These guys are all over it:

http://www.americablog.com/

Of course her campaign is going to sound subtly racist, in a way. She's going into Appalachia in the next two contests. No biggy, guys, just politics, dirt and all.

Oregonians won't like this.

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This is why AMERICA LOVES OBAMA because he is a uniter and as Americans we have more in common than not, Clinton is trying to make us all think it's 1962 or 1975 or 1998 or 1999 but it is 2008!! She can't divide us. But nice try. MSM, nice try...

We have evolved, we are smarter than she/they think. Gas tax holiday? Please, I talked to voters in Indiana and they were NOT BUYING IT! All I had to say was "Did you hear Obama's gas tax rebuttal?" and they were like- yeah I saw the commercials and they were convinced it was a bs idea by Clinton. She is a joke.

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Don't be silly. Obama bashed Hillary quite a lot. And when he did, he always blamed it on her. And he played the race card a number of times. For example when he said that Hillary had belittled MLK for saying that it took LBJ to push through the civil rights legislation of the 1960's. So go ahead. Bash away. Get it out of your system. Call her Annie Oakley if it helps. Then grow up and move on to helping Hillary supporters find a way to vote for Obama. Hint: Suggesting that Hillary wants to give blacks 3/5ths of a vote is preying upon our worst instincts. Let it go. Try not to project your racial views onto everyone else.

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It is disgusting. She is arguing essentially that blacks are Democratic sheep who can be robbed voer their vote and will come back lemminglike to the party in November. Meanwhile her much more important "blue color" "working class" (code for whites, as if blacks and latinos don't work) voters are crucial and must be catered to, even though they are much less loyal. So we reward the disloyal and betray the most loyal. The fact that they're black and there's a long history of disenfranchising people makes it so much the easier.

Frankly, I find this line of thought is utterly repellent and nauseating.

Black people and Latinos/as aren't hardworking blue-collar Americans, silly. We're welfare queens, drug dealers, murders and rapists, gangbangers and illegal immigrants who come to this country to steal white workers' jobs and go on welfare. (That makes a lot of sense, eh?) That's why our votes don't count.

/snark

This isn't designed to win support from undecided Democratic superdelegates (although I have to wonder, sadly, why the hell the party leaders aren't out there rejecting and denouncing the "only white voters count" meme). It's not designed to win her a VP slot. So the only plausible reading is that it's designed to bring Obama down.

Or she thinks that West Virginian and Kentuckian Democrats are such racist rednecks that this is the sort of thing they want to hear.

I just don't see a benign reading of these statements.

HRCs "blue collar" strategy and language is no different than the GOPs "southern" strategy and "states' rights" language. It is racist, pure and simple.

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Why should they be forced to do anything? You acting like these representative have some kind of an obligation to feel the same way about these comments that you do because of the color of their skin or their ethnic background is far more racist than anything Howard Wolfson said. You must be racist. I'll be calling on all readers of TPM to denounce and reject your racist comments.

Personally, even in March - well after the Bill-litzkreig in So. Carolina - I was still of the mindset that she'd have to hang a Black person in Time Square before I would be "Repulsed into voting Republican."

But as reality sets in , rationale says - McCain may seek to limit your reproductive rights then enslave the children you do have under massive debt to the Chinese government, but Hillary seeks to devalue your very stake in the American political process (which took quite a bit of, um, "hope" to establish these past hundred-odd years.) Decisions, decisions....

Hillary needs to drop out, so that racists Republicans can start doing what they do best - maintaining and solidifying Black allegiance to the Democratic Party.

"It's not about (blank) States, or (other blank here) States..it's about the United States!"

"It's not about (blank) voters or (another blank) voters or (blank) people or (some other kind of) people or (those) people or (these) people...it's about US!"

Amen.

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