You know that the world has gone utterly to pot when Peggy Noonan starts making sense.
In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, [Mrs. Clinton] said, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, “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.”White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? “Even Richard Nixon didn't say white,” an Obama supporter said, “even with the Southern strategy.”
If John McCain said, “I got the white vote, baby!” his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is—well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
A resident of New York who twice pulled the lever for Senator Clinton, I will vote for anyone, even Gus Hall’s maggots, before casting another ballot for racist trash of her ilk.
She and all who still support her make me ill.
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.
There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.
We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.
There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?
—Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama (2004)
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