Hillary Clinton could walk on water, provide free education, healthcare and housing to everyone, end poverty as we know it through full employment, cure cancer and give everyone a new iPod, and she still wouldn't get any more black votes. she's been successfully cast as a racist, and she knows it. she's done. there is nothing more poisonous in Democratic politics than being successfully branded as a racist.

how do you defeat a strong woman in Democratic Politics? an electorate much more friendly to women than the Republicans? get her branded as a racist. it's the only thing worse than being called a sexist.

think about it from a logical perspective. you cannot win a democratic primary, especially in the South, by stirring up white racism. the numbers simply don't work. there simply aren't enough white democrats to counter a unified black electorate in the Party in the South. There is no incentive. none. South Carolina, where this all was supposed to have started, has a Democratic electorate that is 45% black. with three candidates in the race, the one that wins that electorate overwhelmingly (especially if you get 90% of it) is going to win the state. you would have to get every single white person to vote for you. the Clinton are southerners, remember, they know this. in Arkansas the democratic electorate if 40% black. You cannot win by being racist. you may be able to win the general election, and you can certainly win the GOP primaries (As we've seen) but you cannot win the Democratic ones. THe whole thing started because Bill Clinton, in an attempt to lower expectations before South Carolina said the perfectly logical thing (that turned out to be perfectly true, by the way, no one mentions that) that black voters in the South have, the all too two times they have been given the chance, voted overwhelmingly for the black candidate. Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, using 90+% of the black vote to do so. So Bill pointed out that Obama was going to win South Carolina because his floor, based on history and polling, was 40%. in a three way race, a floor of 40% is almost guaranteed to win. But that was considered racist to point out, and the meme started. Remember the 'skin-darkening' flap? the Mickey Kantor flap? once the meme starts, you can't stop it and people start to look at everything and anything to find more 'evidence' to support their idea and convince others. and once it's started, you can't disprove it, right? how do you disprove that you are a racist? Does anyone honestly think that Hillary Clinton is racist? given the sum total of knowledge you may have about her? Saying that Obama is having trouble winning the white working class is not racism, ir's fact. He knows it. saying that 95% of blacks are voting for Obama isn't racist, it's the fact. but the meme is out there. I know she was done when the case was made that Bill was playing the race card in South Carolina (but since I firmly believe she would make a better president at this point, I stuck with her)

yes, there are times she has run a poor campaign. yes, she was overcondfident at the start. yes, the palpable excitement that surrounds Obama is remarkable (if, honestly, hard for me to join in on) what disturbs me is that the accusations of racism that have stuck have made it perfectly acceptable in polite company for good democrats to act like Freepers towards Hillary. the language and tone is identical to the worst of the mouth-breathers in the late nineties. (not that I am saying this about you, I have no reason to link you to it, save the racism meme) the only way to describe it is "hate" people HATE hillary, and are egged on in hating her by other Democrats. Imagine that, Democrats actively engaged in passionate hatred against the strongest female politician of our time. We don't do this. This isn't our schitck; hatred of strong women is the GOP's schtick. that doesn't scare you at all? active, passionate hatred against a Democrat, by Democrats, encouraged, at least tacitly, by a Democratic Campaign? This is next generation post partisan politics? this is what we have to look forward to? What will the mob (and by the mob I am referring to the active haters) do when Obama disappoints them (as he invariably will, he's a politician)?

do people love Obama, or are they do wrapped up in hating Hillary that this is all they care about? I see very little attention paid on this board to Obama's positive points (and he has many). go to GPD (I just did, in another window) and see how many threads are positive about Obama. I count ONE, saying he could have a million volunteers on election day. There are two anti-Obama threads. Three pro-Hillary threads. one thanking Hillary from an Obama supporter. one about McCain. the remainder are virulently anti-Hillary. This is what we are down to. Hating Hillary Clinton. Spend a day, if you have the stomach, reading Freeper threads on Hillary and a day reading GDP threads on Hillary. the only major difference is that every now and then someone posts something nice about her here without being tombstoned. The rest of the threads could basically be interchanged.

so in answer to your question. there is no 'healing the racial divide' a large number of primarily white bloggers and internet whackjobs have fed the racist line to the primarily white media and they lapped it up. you can't come back from it, it's like being accused of being a child molester, even if false, the taint never leaves. In their urge to destroy Hillary, fed by passionate hatred, a racial line was created, mostly out of thin air, and that is going to be very hard to fix in the years to come. I hope they think it was worth it.