×
As Kate smartly points out, there's nothing banal about Hillary Clinton's e-mail "congratulating" Barack Obama for his win in South Carolina:
"We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the twenty-two states as well as American Samoa who will vote on February 5th.Only one state in named in that e-mail. And it isn't California, which is the largest. And it isn't New York, which Clinton represents. It's Florida, the state that isn't supposed to matter, and which Clinton is still pledging, at least last I heard, to not campaign in. This is a very interesting kind of dog whistle. It's not to Floridians, who really aren't making decisions based off name-checks in campaign e-mails. It's to the Obama campaign, and the media, and the activists. It's the product, I'd guess, of a calculation that the argument over Florida and Michigan is too complicated to come through clearly, and that dragging the Obama campaign into a high profile procedural dispute will bog down the conversation and keep them bickering, rather than freeing him to surge.
