Julián Castro, whose presidential campaign began to flounder in earnest after he made a dishonest attack on rival candidate Joe Biden's age, has found himself a new group of voters to offend:

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro is calling for Iowa and New Hampshire to lose their coveted status leading off the presidential nominating calendar, pointing to a lack of diversity in both states. While his comments risk angering officialscand voters — in both states, they come as he's already pulled back from New Hampshire amid fundraising and other hurdles for his campaign. In pointed remarks Sunday evening, he said it's time to "change the order of the states." He continued: "I don't believe we're the same country we were in 1972. That's when Iowa first held its caucus first, and by the time we have the next presidential election in 2024, it'll have been more than 50 years since 1972. Our country's changed a lot in those 50 years."

Apparently, losing a third of his voters after insulting Joe Biden for his age wasn't enough for him. He'd now like to lose some more.

First it was old people. Now, it's white people. Suffice to say, Julián Castro has a lot of problems with voters who don't "look like him."

And his howls about the votes of all those white people in those states — which would include people such as illegal alien murder victim Mollie Tibbetts's parents, who were liberally furious at the idea of bringing up their daughter's killer's immigration status — is kind of laughable. Apparently, those white voters in Iowa are all racists who'd never pick a Latino candidate, despite the crazy demonstrated liberalism of some of its Democrats.

What Castro is really trying to say is that it's all about him. Bad white voters are blocking him from soaring in the primaries. It's nothing to do with his sneering demeanor or dishonest attacks, let alone his lousy socialist platform (which would wipe him out in the general in any case); it's those bad white voters of New Hampshire and Iowa, who vote for only other whites. Pay no attention to those votes President Obama got from those dreaded and unrepresentative white states. So long as white states are in the first primaries, in Castroworld, people of color are going to be "held back."

The reality tells a different story. As Silvio Canto noted in his blog here, Castro doesn't have any unusual problem attracting white voters; his real problem is that he's failing to attract Latino voters, presumably the ones he's been put in the race to carry, and presumably the reason for his inexplicable debate podium spots — he sure as heck isn't popular enough to earn one normally, but he does have the right skin color to achieve the balance the Dems like to project.

But Latinos, it turns out, dislike Castro as much as any other voters and are walking away from him like a bad smell. He panders to them in bad Spanish, and he doesn't even speak Spanish. Authentic to them? Nope. It also doesn't help that his ideas are pure Hugo Chávez, too. Been there, done that.

His attempt to blame whites for his flailing political fortunes is the work of a mind that's so fused to identity politics that it can't see straight. He's not just a champ of a particular interest group he claims — Latinos; he's also looking for a reason to put other interest groups down — whether in age, color, what have you. Life to him is color-coded, and everyone of every race and other immutable characteristic gets his/her/their own pigeon hole, and in Castroworld, they all compete against each other, as if it were tribal warfare. Castro couches all of this in the language of woke inclusion, a logic of making everything diverse (except ideas, of course), as if people were quilt squares to be distributed so that no two same colors are touching. Eric Utter basically notes that in more detail here.

So now his campaign is floundering, nobody wants to vote for him, and whitey's the bad guy for it — all because of New Hampshire and Iowa. If he could just, just, just get rid of those early primary states, he's convinced he'd be the winner.

Sorry, pal, doesn't work that way. Nobody likes a candidate who can't stop attacking whole groups of voters. And that's not just in Iowa.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.