As I remarked yesterday, Hillary Clinton can no longer win the Democratic Presidential nomination unless Barack Obama either is assassinated or reveals himself to be the son of Satan. She has every right to continue her completely pointless presidential campaign, but she does not have the right to my respect. To the extent that Hillary Clinton continues her pointless presidential campaign while doing no damage to the political discourse, I’ll just ignore her except in her capacity as a Senator and move on to the consideration of the fall campaign in which she won’t play a role. Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton seems to be intent on pursuing her presidential fantasy by injecting so much venom into politics that she is the only candidate left standing. I can’t ignore that.

Over the last day, Hillary Clinton and her senior staff have made it clear that they intend to try to win by appealing to, accentuating and encouraging racial and intellectual resentment in America. Hillary Clinton’s senior strategic adviser, Paul Begala, started it off by declaring on national television that Democrats “cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans.” And just in case you didn’t get it, Hillary Clinton declared to a USA reporter today that:

Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening again…. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” Clinton said.

Yes, there is a pattern emerging here, and it started long before today, long before Hillary Clinton declared that she didn’t need any pointy-headed experts telling her that her gas tax plan was no good. For months now, Hillary Clinton and her staffers have been telling the world that some states just don’t matter, that people with the wrong skin tone just don’t matter, that people of certain religions just don’t matter, and that people with high levels of education don’t matter. Now she’s even moving beyond that to tell us all that “hard-working people” equals “white people,” and that the people who support Barack Obama are somehow not “hard-working people.”

You know, if I wanted to vote for a racist, anti-intellectual bigot, I’d vote Republican.

Barack Obama calls on us to embrace our better natures.
Hillary Clinton calls on us to crank up the hatred for people who are different than ourselves.

Hillary Clinton and her campaign may be able to provoke people in the short term, but they’ll discover that hate is a difficult emotion to sustain when it isn’t justified. Sooner or later, even Hillary Clinton’s most die hard supporters are going to realize that the divisive, angry vision of America their candidate espouses just doesn’t match reality.

They’ll realize that “eggheads” are intelligent people our President ought to be listening to, and that African-Americans are neighbors they need to get along with. As Hillary Clinton turns her desperate volume up one more notch, they’ll realize they’ve been tempted too far down a dark road that they never intended to take in the first place. For the sake of common decency, they’ll realize that they cannot in good conscience support the campaign of Hillary Clinton any more.