I am NOT chastising Senator Clinton for her race remarks -- I am trying to point out what happens to them when they're out here

So ok, most people know she was comparing her voter appeal to that of Senator Obama, talking about her broader base (and the jokes about how baby got back are already going around)

She started by referring to an analysis done by the Associated Press (perhaps as if it wasn't SHE who was saying it but the A.P.)

The analysis, she said, showed that "Senator 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," she went on to say: "There's a pattern emerging here."

She may have meant only to show that her demographic base was different from and larger than his, but old images of axe handles being handed out and Bull Connors' dogs rose up from the sludge of the South remembered.

"...working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"

The late poet Charles Olson observed that history turns on mythology -- his particular definition of that as going to the root words meaning "that which is said ABOUT that which is said."

And what is being said about what she said?

That she was talking about REAL Americans, Americans with jobs, HARD-WORKING Americans, white Americans... (to which the mind immediately adds: not shiftless lazy non-white Americans)

Makes one thing if Stepin Fetchit were still alive, he'd be featured as the Willie Horton of Senator Clinton's Southern Strategy.

And then adding: "whites ... who had not completed college were supporting me."

Could she POSSIBLY mean "I've got the redneck dummies in my corner?"

Of course not -- SHE doesn't mean that but the wheels turn on what people SAY about what she SAID. And damn if it's not hard to think that and not easy to find another meaning.

One of the endless political speculators in this endless campaign said "In politics, saying what you believe is considered a major gaff."

Or in the worlds of the reprehensible John Wilmot, 2d Earl of Rochester:

"Any man who calls things by their rightful name will surely be hanged.

That goes for women, too.