Oh, damn. Did she just say "white people"?

Having been a Hillary Clinton supporter right up until the point about a week ago when it looked to me as if her winning either a) was impossible or b) would require biblical intervention on the order of the parting of the Red Sea (props to Moses!), I have to say that I am honestly shocked by her statements to USA Today as quoted here. I'm pulled out the relevant passage below:

"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 are several ways to read this quote, most of them predicated on what we might call Senator Clinton's "inner punctuator." Let me run through them quickly:

The too-many-words-and-way-too-many-commas argument: This is the most likely meaning, but also the one that's most difficult to explain because it involves pulling the old "she misspoke" line out of the dustbin. You could make an argument that the entire phrase "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" really probably started out in her head as "hard-working white Americans." In trying to get that thought from head to mouth, she duplicated some of the words and her speech suggested commas that really weren't there in the concept's inception. My parsing of the statement is easily defensible; for better or worse, blue collar white Americans aren't really voting for Obama. 'Nuf said.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop? I think it just did. What about...

The those-commas-should-have-been-dashes argument: This is the argument that's not exactly going to encourage the African-Americans who have long been part of the base of the Clinton machine - and who have been deserting it in droves to vote for Obama - to come rushing back. It would suggest that the commas surrounding the statement "white Americans" should really be dashes, signaling that the phrase "white Americans" is a renaming of the phrase "hard-working Americans." Meaning, in other words, that the only Americans who are hard-working just also happen to be white. I don't think it makes sense to argue that this was Clinton's meaning; however, I can imagine that the statement might be taken this way. Bad news for the campaign among black voters.

Can it get worse? It CAN. What about...

The commas-equal-and argument: Uh-oh. As most of us remember from our high school grammar classes, the mighty comma is most often used as a substitute for the word and. That's why it's not necessary to use a comma before the last item in a list, for example: the and and the comma mean the same thing, so it's not necessary to use both. It could be argued, then, that the comma between "hard-working Americans" and "white Americans" really sets those two groups apart as separate entities; you've got your hard-working Americans in one corner and your white Americans in another and never the twain shall meet. This makes it sound as if hard-working Americans and white Americans are mutually exclusive. Granted, I don't think this is a parsing that many people are going to take from the quote, but it sure is interesting to think that Clinton could have, in a single sentence, alienated almost her entire base.

Now if she can just work something in there about "lazy white American bitches," we'd all jump ship!