Clinton: Vote White
If you is white, you's alright,
if you's brown, stick around,
but if you's black, hmm, hmm, brother,
get back, get back, get back.
-- "Get Back," Big Bill Broonzy
Hillary Clinton says she is in it "until there is a nominee." As Clinton tries to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Barack Obama, she has put her trump card on the table: race.
Clinton’s comeback, such as it is, began in Pennsylvania. So it's fitting that she's channeling Frank Rizzo, the race-baiting mayor of Philadelphia. In 1978, Rizzo wanted to change the rules city charter so that he could run for a third consecutive term. He rallied support for the charter amendment by imploring his supporters to "Vote White."
Clinton told USA Today:
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."
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson writes:
As a statement of fact, that's debatable at best. As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama, it's a slap in the face to the party's most loyal constituency -- African Americans -- and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here's what she's really saying to party leaders: There's no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you'll be sorry.
It bears remembering that no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote since President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. And neither will Obama – or Clinton.
As Jack and Jill Politics points out:
Democrats will certainly struggle to win without a substantial minority of white voters, but there's no question that they can't win without us.
So while black voters are expected to get back, for Democrats, the road to the White House runs through black America.
