While the media have made much about Obama's problems with drawing working-class white voters, a far more serious racial problem for the Democrats has been ignored: Clinton's utter failure to attract black voters -- especially in the South, where black voter support is absolutely vital for any Democrat to win.
It's no accident that except for her former home state of Arkansas, Clinton has failed to win a single Southern state -- where African-Americans make up a substantial percentage of the Democratic electorate -- since Super Tuesday.
Even in Texas -- which considers itself more Western than Southern -- Clinton's narrow win in Texas' Democratic primary was more than offset by Obama's landslide victory in the state's Democratic caucuses, handing Obama a slim majority of the state's 185 pledged delegates.
Clinton's standing among African-American voters has been in free fall ever since her husband, former President Bill Clinton, made disparaging remarks about Obama during and after the South Carolina primary in January that drew blistering criticism as being racially insensitive -- including a strongly-worded blast by this blogger in a January 28 column.
Clinton's Support Among Blacks Is Worst of Any Democrat Since Wallace in '72
Exit polls taken in last week's Indiana and North Carolina primaries found the former first lady's support among black voters to have fallen to the single digits -- the worst such showing by a Democratic presidential candidate in any primary since former Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972.
Wallace, a one-time arch-segregationist whose campaign came to a sudden end with his near-assassination by a gunman while on a swing through Maryland, barely registered a blip with black voters in the Democratic primaries.
Bill and Hillary Clinton had enjoyed tremendous popularity with African Americans over the years -- with writer Toni Morrison even affectionately dubbing Bill Clinton "America's first black president" -- until Bill Clinton played the "race card" against Obama last January.
The former president tried to belittle the Illinois senator's overwhelming victory in South Carolina -- where African Americans make up more than 50 percent of the Democratic vote -- by comparing it to the Reverend Jesse Jackson's South Carolina wins in 1984 and 1988 in a naked attempt to paint Obama in a corner as "the black candidate" unable to attract white voter support.
In my January 28 column, this blogger wrote a stern warning -- aimed directly at the former president -- that has since proven to be prophetic:
"What you've done, Bill, was disgraceful. Totally disgraceful. And your gratuitous slap at Obama in his moment of victory could end up costing your wife the Democratic nomination. This blogger has four words for you, Bill: Shut the [expletive deleted] up!"
But, as it turned out, he didn't -- and now Bill Clinton will face the inevitable second-guessing; already, some pundits have likened the former president to a submarine that fired a torpedo and sank his own battleship.
The claim that Obama can't draw working-class whites is a theme that the Clinton campaign has used again and again -- most recently in Pennsylvania and now in West Virginia and Kentucky, with their high concentrations of working-class white voters.
But in claiming that only she can draw the support of working-class white voters, Clinton succeeded in alienating black voters of all classes -- and they've punished her by voting in greater and greater margins for Obama in every primary and caucus since South Carolina.
In the process, the Clinton name, once lionized, is now mud among African-Americans. And while women in general have formed the backbone of Clinton's voter support, black women have turned solidly against her, with the exit polls showing black women voting for Obama by ratios as high as 8 to 1.
Democrats Can Ill-Afford Clinton's Negative Baggage
I'm a native of New York City who's called the Green Mountain state of Vermont home since the summer of 1994. A former freelance journalist, I'm a fiercely independent freethinker who's highly skeptical of authority figures -- especially when they're on the wrong side of the issues I care about. But I'm not afraid to also call into question those with whom I would usually be "on the same page" if and when they, too, are on the wrong side of the issues I care about.
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