Also from the Post ( excerpt from longer article)

"Lower-income white Democrats may well defect to John McCain in the fall if Obama is the nominee, Clinton is arguing, whereas African Americans -- who have been choosing Obama by 9 to 1 -- are going to vote for the Democratic nominee no matter what. Thus, she claims, she can better knit the party back together.

Let's examine those premises. These are white Democrats we're talking about, voters who generally share the party's philosophy. So why would these Democrats refuse to vote for a nominee running on Democratic principles against a self-described conservative Republican? The answer, which Clinton implies but doesn't quite come out and say, is that Obama is black -- and that white people who are not wealthy are irredeemably racist.

The other notion -- that Clinton could position herself as some kind of Great White Hope and still expect African American voters to give her their enthusiastic support in the fall -- is just nuts. Obama has already won a majority of the Democratic primary contests; within a couple of weeks, he almost certainly will have won a majority of the pledged convention delegates and will be assured of finishing with more of the popular vote. Only in Camp Clinton does anyone believe that his supporters will be happy if party leaders tell him, in effect, "Nice job, kid, but we can't give you the nomination because, well, you're black. White people might not like that."

Clinton's sin isn't racism, it's arrogance. From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has refused to consider the possibility that Obama's success was more than a fad. This was supposed to be Clinton's year, and if Obama was winning primaries, there had to be some reason that had nothing to do with merit. It was because he was black, or because he had better slogans, or because he was a better public speaker, or because he was the media's darling. This new business about white voters is just the latest story the Clinton campaign is telling itself about the usurper named Obama. "