Clinton Touts White Support By Kate Phillips
As if the divisions between race and gender in the Democratic Party hadn’t been further exposed through Tuesday night’s exit polls — and by a very heated exchange on CNN between Donna Brazile and Paul Begala — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s interview with USA Today on Wednesday is further mining those tense depths.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in the interview, citing an article by The Associated Press. It “found how Senator 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. “There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.
While she said her remarks weren’t meant to be divisive, they’re already whipping around the Internet. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that,” she said in the interview. (Hint, hint, message to the superdelegates still undeclared.)
In Indiana alone, six in 10 white voters went for Mrs. Clinton, where she narrowly won the primary.
Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, told the newspaper that Mr. Obama had made inroads in Tuesday’s contests. And he added that her comments “are not true and frankly disappointing.”
On Tuesday night, we mentioned the dustup between two Democratic pundits, Ms. Brazile and Mr. Begala, who engaged in a prime-time debate about the coalitions being built by Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Begala, a Clinton supporter, said the party could not win in November with just “eggheads and African-Americans,” that the party could not ignore white middle-class voters. Ms. Brazile, who said she was not “undecided but undeclared” when it came to her choice for a candidate, shot back that Mr. Begala’s notions were dividing the party. (And that she’d chugged down many a beer with Joe and Jane “six-pack” in an effort to woo white voters.)
We’re revisiting their spirited exchange to demonstrate how divided party loyalists are right now.