Tucker Carlson and Christine Todd Whitman are on “The Verdict” right now wondering why people in West Virginia and Kentucky are going to vote for Hillary instead of Obama.

Gee - maybe because Obama is black?

There are of course reasons why people wouldn’t vote for Obama, legitimate reasons. But when, in a state (West Virginia) that’s 95 percent white, which has far fewer college grads than virtually any other state in the country, Hillary outpolls Obama by some 30 percent - I’m sorry, but there’s something more to that.

And Josh Marshall finds it, in a WaPo/ABC News poll:

While overall discomfort with an African-American president is much lower, it rises among less-educated whites - the same group that’s been a challenge for Obama in the Democratic primaries. Among whites who haven’t gone through college, 17 percent say they’d be at least somewhat uncomfortable with a black president; that compares with just 4 percent of white college graduates. Clinton may face a similar problem, however; less-educated whites also are more apt to be uncomfortable with a woman president (21 percent, vs. 7 percent of white college graduates).

And so now, in this great election of the common man, I’m supposed to have some empathy for this.

I have zero empathy for this.

Because I’m sorry, if you “have reservations” about a black president, that’s racism. You might have reservations about this particular potential black president; you might have problems with individual candidates. But we’re all trying to dance around the fact that in these states, those “reservations” are specifically tied to race. We’re trying to pretend this is legitimate. Indeed - so far in the campaign, we’ve come pretty close to declaring it “elitist” to suggest that there’s anything wrong with this at all. And Hillary is implicitly suggesting that this “discomfort” on the basis of race is all right.

It isn’t. And I see this election as forcing the Democratic Party - and maybe the country - to finally come to terms with this.