From the column: More on the growing divide among Democrats

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: May 12, 2008

Every time I hear a Democratic strategist say how good this primary process has been for the party, I shake my head in disbelief.

It might have been true early on, and it might have been true even as late as halfway through the process. After all, Democrats are seeing record turnouts, high numbers of new voter registrations and excitement and interest in the race that have made news on their own.

But the longer this thing goes on, the more supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seem to dig in their respective heels. As CNN’s Candy Crowley put it, the last month has seen a definite “hardening” of each candidate’s supporters—and it’s especially true of Clinton’s backers.

Exit polling in Indiana last week showed that only 48 percent of Clinton supporters said they would support Obama if he is the nominee; that’s compared to 70 percent of Obama’s supporters who say they would back Clinton if she leads the ticket (see “The bitterness factor”  from last week’s election returns coverage).

That’s the statistic to keep an eye on as the primary season wraps up over the next three weeks. It’s been dubbed the “bitterness index,“ and it could have just as much to with electability as the nominee.

And that was before all the race- and class-baiting by Clinton’s supporters in the wake of Tuesday’s results. There was Paul Begala’s much-covered “eggheads and African-Americans” comment (which, setting aside the obvious divisiveness of the word choice, is still curious: Democrats can’t win with just those groups, Begala said, but they certainly can’t win without them, so why alienate them?), and then Clinton herself gave an interview to USA Today in which she said:

“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.

I read one comment that asked whether Clinton was insinuating that black Americans aren’t hard workers.

It was as if Hillary Clinton was introducing a new slogan:

Hillary Clinton: The White Folks’ Candidate.

Yes, Hillary’s right; there is a pattern emerging here—but it’s not the one to which she’s referring.

It’s a pattern of race-baiting that began with ugly undertones in South Carolina and has never been more apparent than now, as Clinton continues to hope that delegates will override the results of the entire primary season and hand the nomination to her even in the face of her trailing in every indicator the campaign could produce.

You know the old axiom: Desperation does ugly things to people.

Democrats are sick of this. If you doubt it, I refer you back to the now-infamous Begala-Brazile exchange. I was listening to it when it happened, and I stopped what I was doing to look up and see what was going on. If you haven’t seen it, I really encourage you to watch it. You can see for yourself that it was remarkable for its raw tone, which reflected the frayed nerves, the irritation and aggravation this drawn-out process has created.

Their talking points notwithstanding, this nomination fight has taken its toll on Democrats. And every minute that Hillary Clinton stays in the race is another minute with an opportunity for her to make a “white Americans”-like comment that makes it worse—and spikes the bitterness index.