This is How Clinton Won West Virginia…

I’ll say it since no one in th media will. She won West Virginia because a lot of West Virginians are racist. A lot of the aren’t. But a lot of them are.

And I’ve got to put this out there. Clinton makes the argument that her base is the old and uneducated. How in the world is that an argument in her favor? It’s no way to build the party. Oh, and these people are voting republican at the drop of a hat in November. West Virginia is not going to go Democratic.

Happy Groundhog Day, forever. Wait! maybe there’s an upside. If the Democrats can’t get the nomination right and are therefore doomed to repeat it, we’ll never get to the general election, which means we’ll never get to the McCain first term.

Then again, that keeps us stuck in the Bush administration. Forever.

Now you see why I’m cynical?

Well, I’m Glad I’m Not the Only One Who Thought It.

Sometimes, since I occasionally teach on racial politics, I think I am far too sensitive to race in the US. I over-react to things that are probably much less dire than my original reaction. But this really took it for me:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. 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.” (emphasis mine).

I’ve never been a big fan of Clinton, and until she started going after Obama with a kitchen sink, I would have voted for her. I decided then that I would stay home if it was her against McCain. But this race baiting, which has culminated in her equating “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans” just reinforces the awful stereotypes that prevent the US from having a decent anti-poverty policy (thank you, Satan… I mean, Mr. Reagan).That blacks aren’t hard-working, that they skate by doing nothing and that they are lazy and somehow not as worthy of being American as whites. Last time I checked, Mrs. Clinton, Blacks are no longer worth only 3/5ths of a human being and their votes count every bit as much as a hard-working white vote.

Well, at least I’m not the only one who thought it. Big props to one of my new favorite blogs, Reappropriate.