http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10rich.html
<begin excerpt>
But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark
show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic
pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against
each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have "not
shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates."
Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a
debate that her pollster was "making a historical statement."
It wasn't an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie,
and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as
heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist
Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black
members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black
mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron
Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the
Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign's decision to sow
misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to
"undermine one of Obama's central selling points, that he can build
bridges and unite Americans of all types."
If that was the intent, it didn't work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her
expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight
grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26
percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that
in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53
percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign's attempt to
drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has
backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton
won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat
Mr. Obama by only 3 points.
The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign
will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose
March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at
little.
<end excerpt>
Complete column at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10rich.html
Michael