Greg Sargent, at TPM, sounds shocked at the latest race-based appeal from the Clinton campaign. His post of the Clinton morning conference call is below:
On the Hillary conference call, Hillary chief strategist Geoff Garin made the case for her electability in some of the most explicitly race-based terms I've heard yet.
Garin argued that the North Carolina contest, which Obama won by 14 points, represented "progress" for Hillary because she did better among white voters there than she did in Virginia.
"When we began in North Carolina," Garin said, "our internal polling and much of the public polling [showed] we were running exactly even with white voters."
Garin said that the Virginia electorate was the "closest white electorate in the country" to North Carolina, and added that Hillary "started even" among whites in North Carolina, and "ended up earning a significant win of 24 points."
"We obviously did not do as well as we would want or needed to among African American voters," Garin concluded.
Put in the context of the Hillary campaign's chief argument that she's the more electable Dem, Garin's overall implication here is that her success among white voters in North Carolina yesterday is "progress" in the sense that it strengthens her case for electability.
In other words, it's an explicit, and unabashed, linking of her claim of electability to her success among whites.
It amuses me that this is such a revelation to Greg Sargent at TPM. This strategy is what we've known from the Clinton campaign since New Hampshire.