But they only make me wonder what she can be possibly thinking. And it’s really kinda sad to see.

Via USA Today:

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

“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.

The coalition of voters supporting Obama includes a distinct majority of voters under the age of 60, which outnumbers the voters over 60 by a sizable margin. Which is how he has gained more popular votes and more delegates. So who REALLY has the ‘broader’ base?

She suggests she can yet ‘build’ a winning coalition, yet has not consistently demonstrated that ability after being an announced candidate for more than 15 months. It is especially odious to hear her specific wording, to wit “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans” as it suggests that ‘working’ and ‘hard-working’ are synonymous with ‘white’. Further, the logic part doesn’t square: if there’s a 30% gap in white support but that’s more than offset by an 80% gap in Black American support, then his coalition, before any further building, already exceeds hers.

And then there’s the assumption that white voters in one state or region share the same sentiments as other states or regions. Which can be proven false by years of evidence. The racial polarity of voters in Mississippi, for example, has been clear since Fannie Lou Hamer tried to gett the Mississippi Freedom delegation seated at the 1964 Democratic convention. But that doesn’t describe the voting biases of the New York electorate, nor Pennsylvania’s, nor North Carolina’s. And, since white Americans vastly outnumber Black Americans in each of the 50 states, his winning of more than 60% of the contests to date actually indicates her ‘base’ is defecting in sufficient numbers to grant him the overall lead by every honest metric.

It may be true that Obama’s experienced some weakening among the demographic she describes, especially after the media carried her water with the Wright controversy and Obama’s acknowledged mistake of overgeneralizing in his description of rural voters provided to an urban audience. But is that weakening permanent? She has no proof of that.

One risks being labelled an elitist to also point out that people with added education - trained to think more critically - prefer Obama. Or to note the opposite: the least educated prefer her. There may, in some states, be a numerical advantage in that at a specific moment. But doesn’t it also suggest that they cannot be persuaded to change their opinions because they’re too stuck in their thinking to judge that Obama may be preferable over McCain despite their current preference of Clinton over Obama?

That’s pretty presumptuous and elitist, too.

The clearest emerging pattern is that Clinton’s arguments grow more disingenuous and more overt in suggesting there’s an insurmountable racial divide. Yet while that polarity has varied both ways in the base she defines as her own, the most consistent pattern through the primaries has been her steady loss of more and more Black American support.

The best available metric to determine electability is to weigh the polls state-by-state, with the two candidates matched against McCain. And so far, any edge by Clinton has been demonstrably minimal. It’s also apparent that McCain’s had difficulty polling above 45% in any case, so he remains the weakest candidate of the three.

Of course, when virtually every metric works against an ongoing Clinton candidacy, it’s understandable that she has to reach to niche metrics to make any case at all. But she does so at great risk, especially to her own aspirations should she ever reach above the Senate again. She may not be a racist, but there’s already been harm to the reputation she and her husband once enjoyed within the Black American demographic.That and the hostility that’s occurred between the ardent supporters of these two candidates may do more damage to her than to the Democratic party.

On reflection, though I once respected Bill Clinton as a shrewd campaigner, my opinion has changed. By seeking to be Everyman and digging out narrow wins, some of the hostility that gets generated now appears to be at least partially self-generated, not just now in Hillary’s campaign, but throughout his political career. They both lseem to enjoy the inside fight a little too much, perhaps turning some potential allies into foes while simultaneously doing the opposite. Maybe by fighting a game of inches for too many years, they’ve lost the capacity to win a few by miles.