Hitchens called it. Yesterday on Hewitt’s show:

What I’m thinking is that in a little while, people will be marveling over who well she’s done in West Virginia and Kentucky. And by that time, the vote will have become thoroughly racialized, if you don’t mind that rather disgusting expression. And people will be speaking about Barack Obama as having won the black vote, as if there was such a thing as if people vote with their epidermis, which they’re already saying about North Carolina. And she will be implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, and with the help of her husband, well, that’s not all there is to it. Look at how many white people want to vote for me. So what’s all this about a post-racial election? And the Democrats will be made to feel nervous on this point, and I think they’ll take it all the way to Denver.

And now Her Majesty today:

“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.”…

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton’s comment was a “poorly worded” variation on the way analysts have been “slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms.”

However, he said her primary support doesn’t prove she’s more electable. Either Democrat will get “the vast majority” of the other’s primary election votes in a general election, he said.

Sabato’s right, and if you look at the crosstabs from Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio broken down by race and party ID, you’ll find that he does almost as well as her among white independents: Her margins in the three states, respectively, are four, four, and eight points. He also beat her straight up among white men on Super Tuesday in, of all places, Georgia. Having said that, are we to pretend that some people aren’t, in fact, voting “with their epidermis,” as Hitch puts it? The whole punchline to this nomination process is that they’re running on essentially identical platforms — and yet, she crushed him among white Democrats in the aforementioned three states, with upwards of 20% of all voters in Texas and Ohio admitting that race was an “important factor” in their vote (the majority in each case broke for her). It’s not just policy preferences that are giving Obama 90% of the black vote either. So what’s so shocking about what she said? That it’s horribly inaccurate, or that it’s horribly candid in acknowledging that race might affect electability even among the virtuous, transcendent left — a point the superdelegates are already keenly aware of thanks to the endless media speculation about what black voters will do if they hand her the nomination?

Ah well. As the ship goes down, we’re bound to hear a few last desperate screams like this. And make no mistake, down it’s a-goin’: “Despite the public bluster in a conference call with reporters Wednesday, some Clinton advisers were resigned to their candidate’s likely loss. They have turned in favor of her bowing out for party unity, according to several who asked not to be named. Only a few are said to be urging her to fight on, even to the Aug. 25-28 convention in Denver. Among these voices, the loudest belongs to her husband, former President Clinton, according to one longtime Democratic Party insider and Clinton supporter.” Exit question: Which group is most responsible for Hillary’s collapse? Men? Blacks? Or her own moronic campaign staff? Read number two on this list and cherish the allegations about Mark Penn’s idiocy forever.

Update: Hmmm.