You knew it would come to this.

With her back against the wall, Hillary Clinton, with allegedly progressive credentials, has decided that the time has come to play the race card. With Pennsylvania a must-win state, Hillary used subtle race-baiting to ensure her victory.

In trying to get the votes of Pennsylvania’s significant rural and blue-collar populations, she jumped all over the idea that Obama was “an elitist.” You don’t have to be fluent in the language of racism to know what “elitist” means in this context. Substitute the word “uppity,” and you’ll know exactly what she was trying to convey.

The people of rural Pennsylvania knew what she meant. They don’t cotton much to a Black man with a Harvard degree and who associated with some dark characters in his past. They overwhelmingly voted for Hillary, helping her to the double-digit victory she needed to legitimize the continuance of her candidacy.

It wasn’t her first use of the race card, either.

Right before the New Hampshire primary, the Clinton campaign (through surrogates, of course), started leaking tales of Obama’s drug use as a teenager. They were trying their hardest to portray him as that kind of Black man.

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton compared Obama’s victory to Jesse Jackson’s in 1984 and 1988. The point was that the victory was meaningless since South Carolina is a heavily Black state and even radicals like Jackson and Obama (neatly paired in the same pea-pod) could win there.

There’s a reason why the Clinton’s play the race card, bigotry has a way of trumping reason. 

Obama’s resounding defeat in Pennsylvania on Tuesday and his dismal showing among rural voters sends a very clear message: America may be ready for a Black president in theory, but definitely not in practice.

As much as these people didn’t care for the idea of a woman president, it was a far easier pill to swallow than the idea of a brilliant Black man running the country. That’s why so many of them said that if Obama was the candidate, they’d either vote for John McCain or not vote at all.

In 2006, voters in Tennessee told pollsters that Harold Ford, Jr. was their man. When the results came out, ford had lost out in his Senate bid. That was only the latest case of a Black candidate doing much better in the polls than in the ultimate vote.

When people can hide inside of the anonymity of a voting booth, their true colors have a way of coming out.