Hillary on Poor Whites Circa '95: 'Screw 'em!'

The Huffington Post is reaching into the way, way-back machine to rehash quotes by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that stand in contrast to her recent courting of blue collar voters:

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."

So, it would seem once again that Obama and Clinton have more in common than not.

After the jump, brief analysis, including why you shouldn't let this cloud your opinion of Hillary, and why I wag my finger at the Obama campaign on this.

This kind of thing gets a lot of attention, but I don't see that it disproves her credentials with blue-collar voters. Rather than that, I think it validates them, and it fleshes out the phenomenon of working class whites voting against their own interests based on "culture war" issues that Barack Obama was referring to in his April 6 remarks. Either way, it is illustrative of the problem that all Democrats face in connecting with so-called "Reagan Democrats."

Husband and then-President Bill Clinton stepped in and gave a more reasoned assessment that sounds remarkably familiar:

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary's sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They're the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

The wag of the finger? Well, this story came to me in an email from the Obama campaign to reporters. All 3 campaigns do this on a regular basis, Obama's less than most, so there's nothing unusual about it. I can't say I really blame them, but with a headline like that, it's also hard to keep claiming the high road.