This is a pretty obtuse column by Peggy Noonan today, in which she expresses some amazement that the Democrats are engaging in their usual race and gender obsessions, and for some reason wants them to be saved from their own campaign tactics.
Noonan quotes Donna Brazile, from a recent exchange with Clinton flack Paul Begala, on CNN:
"...stop the divisions. Stop trying to split us into these groups, Paul, because you and I know ... how Democrats win..."
This is the same Donna Brazile who, as a campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000 said, "we're not going to let the white boys win." Apparently, sowing division among Democrats is wrong, but sowing division among Americans is OK.
Noonan continues:
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
True enough, but that's what the Democrats do, and have done for years. This is like being shocked to see consumption of beer at a college fraternity house.
Remember Al Gore, in a black church just before the 2000 election, "...when my opponent talks about strict-constructionists for the Supreme Court, I often think of the strictly constructed meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written, how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being..."
Remember Congressman Charles Rangel, in response to the Republican Contract with America in 1994, "It's not [anti-Hispanic epithet that rhymes with flick] or [anti-black epithet that rhymes with bigger] any more, they say 'let's cut taxes'."
Remember the anti-Bush ad from 2000, courtesy of the NAACP, featuring the daughter of murder victim James Byrd saying, "...when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again."
Or the ad from the Democratic Party in Missouri, "When you don't vote, you let another church explode. When you don't vote, you allow another cross to burn. When you don't vote, you let another assault wound a brother or sister ... Vote smart. Vote Democratic for Congress and the U.S. Senate."
But now it's suddenly beyond the pale (no pun intended) for Hillary Clinton to say out loud that she can attract more white voters than Obama can? Please.
What Noonan doesn't explain is why she wants the party of Jim Crow to be saved.