Clinton Catches Fire From Latinos For `Disloyalty'

There's one thing about gleefully playing racial politics - once you choose to go down that muddy road, you're pretty much stuck with it unless you want to look like an absolute charlatan.

As you know, I've written before on these pages about what I considered to be the Clinton's deliberate tactics in making use of the animosity between Blacks and Latinos as a campaign strategy to marginalize Barack Obama as the Official Black Candidate, and the way Barack Obama stepped into it inhis own attempt to play the race card. This worked well for the Clintons in places like Nevada, Florida and California,( just as it worked well for Obama in South Carolina and Georgia) and Lady Macbeth has been rewarded with a vast majority of the Latino vote.

However, she may have overplayed her hand.

After Obama's sweep of the primaries over the weekend, Senator Clinton decided to make a personnel change and have her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, who's Hispanic, step down in favor of long-time Clintonista Maggie Williams - who just happens to be black.

This apparently didn't sit well with Steven Ybarra, a California superdelegate who heads the voting-rights committee of the DNC Hispanic Caucus.

According to the New York Post,he circulated a blistering e-mail to the other members of the caucus, accusing Clinton of disloyalty for ousting a Latino in favor of a black.

"Apparently, loyalty is not a two-way street," he wrote. "Latino superdelegates like myself . . . will have cause to pause."

Ybarra was quoted by the Post as calling the removal of Solis Doyle just weeks before the Texas primary, where 36 percent of the population is Hispanic, was "dumb as a stump."

He may very well be correct about that.

For her part, Solis Doyle did what was expected of her and told the press that Ybarra was writing on "false information," and that she's staying on as an adviser.