Hillary Clinton's quest to piss off everybody

Her latest inflammatory comments:

"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.

Now, in a primary race against the first serious black nominee ever, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. I don't think there was intentional malice here--I don't think she was making some kind of political calculation to be racially divisive--but I do think that she has got it into her head that, somehow, in making this kind of observation she is simply being a political realist, and that the thought of her being racist in any way is so laughable that no one would ever think of calling it racially divisive. And so she goes ahead and says it.

But in doing so, she's pissing everybody off. For example, she's certainly got Bob Herbert's hackles in the 12 o'clock position:

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

...

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

The crazy thing about it is, I'm sure the Clintons are so steeped in their perception of themselves that they'll fail to see how opinions like Herbert's have a legitimate basis. They'll probably come to the conclusion that Obama supporters are playing the race card on them, accusing the Obama campaign of turning a non-racist comment into a semi-racist one.

And none of this does the Democratic Party any good whatsoever.