Sen. Hillary Clinton laid out her claim to her party’s nomination in pretty raw terms yesterday.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she told USA Today. She cited press reports “that found how Sen. [Barack] 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.”
That may well be true, and it’s certainly a fair topic for political commentary.
But when a candidate herself talks that way, it comes across as a supremely unsubtle use of code words – ugly and unacceptable.
Race in America is a fraught issue, to put it mildly.
Clinton obviously feels that her own ends are served by exacerbating racial tensions, but America’s interests are not.
The senator needs to stop it.