"Bush's brain" offers some casual remarks that reveal just how much this campaign is implicitly about race.

TAMPA -- The emerging demographics of this campaign are pretty clear: To win, Barack Obama is trying to assemble a coalition of minorities and just enough white voters -- particularly college-educated white women -- to get to 51 percent, while Mitt Romney is trying to assemble a coalition of the rest of the white voters, and just enough minorities. As Ron Brownstein has persuasively argued, Obama's path to victory lies in winning 80 percent of minorities, and 40 percent of whites; Mitt Romney's corresponding formula is to win 61 percent of whites, provided whites make up 74 percent of the vote.

The math is inexorable, and it points, as Brownstein wrote, "to the depth of racial polarization shadowing this election." This unsettling reality about our politics is often, strangely, left unexplored (with some notable exceptions) even as its effects are constantly discussed, and even celebrated, at least by political professionals. On Monday, in an interesting conversation with Politico's Mike Allen, Karl Rove observed that "Obama has no chance of carrying Indiana." Rove then recounted a conversation that he said he had had over dinner last spring with Indiana's governor, Mitch Daniels:

And I said, 'Mitch, is there a white Democrat south of Indianapolis who's supporting Obama who's not a college professor in Bloomington?' [Laughter] And he stopped for a minute over his green beans and says, 'Not that I can think of.' You know, Indiana's gone.

These remarks come at about the 9:40 mark in the video below, though the whole thing is worth watching.





To be clear: I'm not saying this is racist. I'm saying that it's striking how much we're talking about race in this campaign, without, you know, talking about race. Rove was speaking about racial politics clinically, astringently, the way political professionals do -- it is a shorthand that, as his audience's knowing laughter suggests, all these politicos comprehend. The same sort of analysis leads operatives of all stripes to make recommendations about how to energize target groups by exploiting race and class divides. That's the campaign we're all experiencing.