Bob Herbert nails the Clintons

I've been resisting commenting on Hillary's comment about how her support comes from hard-working white Americans, because I feel like I have been beating up on her, and I would like to be gracious as this comes to a close.

But Bob Herbert puts it perfectly. This is Hillary's original comment, in 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."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Charlie Rangel, the man who first suggested to Hillary that she run for Senate in New York and a diehard supporter, was just a little disappointed:

“I can’t believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb.”

The first problem is that she implies that somehow there is something different about how hard-working Americans are white Americans. She doesn't say anything explicit, but it's a strange association. As if Asian Americans aren't hard-working Americans? She's supposed to be ultra-competent and very smart, but this is not a good way to express yourself if you want to be president.

There are two ways to look at the charge that Obama's support among white working class people is weakening: either that is his fault, or their fault. If it's his fault, that means that he's not communicating with them effectively, or at least not as effectively as Hillary is. But if it's their fault, then they are judging him as somehow not their kind of candidate. The injection of race makes it sound as if they are not willing to support an African American candidate.

Here's where Herbert nails it, and writes what I have been thinking:

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

I've known racist white people, a few scattered here and there. But I know far more white people, of all classes and backgrounds, who are not racist, and understand that racism is wrong. The vast, vast majority of white people that I have known think that. Even, what do you know, working class people without college degrees. Partially because many of the white working class people I have worked with worked with working class black people. And, as colleagues often do, they usually ended up getting along and respecting each other.

What's amazing about this is that at this point, several days later, Hillary has not apologized for this comment, which implies that she has no clue what a faux pas it is. The theme of Herbert's column is that the Clintons have no class, particularly when it comes time to leave. He recounts several incidents at the end of Bill's tenure that I had forgotten about or ignored. Which brings up another problem: by continuing her campaign, Hillary gives the press and her opponents ever more excuses to bring up embarassing moments or inconvenient facts from Bill's Presidency that the rest of us have tried to forget. She keeps saying that she has been vetted. But that implies that she has also been acquitted, that her sins have been forgiven. No, they haven't. Some of us tried to forgive, and we tried to forget. Now I will never do either.

I was one of those people who defended Clinton from his critics on the left. I don't hate the DLC or moderate or centrist Democrats. But I think, in the final analysis, I have to agree with Bob Herbert:

The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.