Hillary Clinton, Disciple of Lee Atwater

"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."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Brother, is there ever!
It is a pattern that goes back to George Wallace's 1968 and 1972 efforts (the latter, prior to the assassination attempt, obviously). It's the pattern that Lee Atwater recognized when studying past campaigns for a way to convince white southern men that Democrats are not their friends. It is the pattern that every Republican president in the last 30 years has used to enter the White House: convince the working poor whites that the blacks are their problem. And that the Democrats are more concerned for "those" blacks than "us" whites.
There is a remarkable quality to Americans when it comes to our public life together: we mean to get ahead. That is why so many of us are resistant to appeals based on economics, which inevitably means class. We just can't bring ourselves to see the rich as our problem, because we all hope to be them someday. So we accept "Right to Work" which is spectacular double-speak for "Right to Fire Whenever It Suits Me Whether I Have a Reason or Not." We accept all-time high corporate profits for ExxonMobile, among others, when they are destroying the economy with their price-gouging on gas prices. We admire Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for their fortunes. Hell, we even made a celebrity out of a chump hustler like Donald Trump. Why? He has, to date, been rich once more than he's been poor.
Those in the poorer classes will not blame the wealthy, because we're all sure that we're just one promotion, one authored book, one computer innovation, or, at the bare minimum, the right sequence of numbers on our lottery ticket from moving into Manhattan's Dakota, the Kennedys' Palm Beach, or the Governator's block, and living the high life with all of the people on the cover of the National Enquirer.
So someone else must be the problem, the reason I haven't gotten there yet. George Wallace had an explanation: those smart Washington lawyers have handed the country over to the [blacks]. Atwater used it to elect Reagan. They attacked Affirmative Action, and interpreted it to mean that Reconstruction had returned with a vengeance, and that vengeance was in the hands of angry black people. George I advertised Willie Horton, and his idiot son ran an ad with white hands opening an envelope and reading the enclosed letter that informed the recipient that their job had been given to a black person. Why? Washington mandates! From the old Republican whipping-boy, the Democratic Congress! This is hideously brilliant! In one fell swoop, racism becomes acceptable, and anti-intellectual biases are embraced. If you think this is hyperbolic, remember the basis of the last two Republican campaigns for president: smart, accomplished people like Al Gore and John Kerry aren't like us. We shouldn't vote for them, thinking they're smarter than we are and all. We like the other guy, the one who can't form a complete sentence. The one who stumbles over his words. The one who lost every business he ever ran until his buddies gave him a piece of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and the only reason he didn't run that into the ground is that the Rangers were already the worst franchise in Major League Baseball. He makes us feel good about ourselves. Let's have him! He's no elitist like Gore, with his Harvard education. No, our boy has the Common Man's Yale degree! That he got through a legacy admission, not any merit or accomplishment on his own. Now, that's Affirmative Action!
Now, on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton joined this parade of shame. She made the statements at the head of this post, to scream from the mountaintop that the black candidate and his black supporters are about to steal our party and our country. If Hillary means to join the Republican Race Brigade, she needs to remember one thing: Obama can't steal this nomination. He's earned his position through a long, hard campaign. HE'S AHEAD, for crying out loud. And what eats at Hillary Clinton is that she can't catch him at this point.
Then again, perhaps she has studied the Atwater Manual so thoroughly that she has grasped the concept that she might be able to steal the nomination if she can tell the Big Lie often and loudly enough.
After all, that's how Rove got dubyer two terms in the White House.