The Week

Hillary Clinton says she is winning the votes of “hard-working Americans.” Maybe so, but she needs a majority of Democrats.

You would think, from the cartoons and the commentary, that Clinton had revived the politics of the young Robert Byrd. Give her, and us, a break. What she said, trying to put the best face on her disappointing showing in North Carolina and Indiana, was this: “Senator Obama’s support among . . . hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. . . . Whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” Maybe those voters will stay home on Election Day, or vote for John McCain, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. And maybe not. But this is the kind of speculation that pundits and political demographers indulge in routinely. It shows an obsession with racial etiquette to hammer Hillary Clinton for speaking the same way. Could it happen to a better person than the wife of the man who played racial-etiquette games so adroitly all the years of his presidency? No; but that still doesn’t make it legit.

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Hillary Clinton says she is winning the votes of “hard-working Americans.” Maybe so, but she needs a majority of Democrats.

You would think, from the cartoons and the commentary, that Clinton had revived the politics of the young Robert Byrd. Give her, and us, a break. What she said, trying to put the best face on her disappointing showing in North Carolina and Indiana, was this: “Senator Obama’s support among . . . hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. . . . Whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” Maybe those voters will stay home on Election Day, or vote for John McCain, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. And maybe not. But this is the kind of speculation that pundits and political demographers indulge in routinely. It shows an obsession with racial etiquette to hammer Hillary Clinton for speaking the same way. Could it happen to a better person than the wife of the man who played racial-etiquette games so adroitly all the years of his presidency? No; but that still doesn’t make it legit.