What’s just Alaska, you ask? Why just a little casual racism and sexism from your Republican Vice Presidential nominee, that’s all:

“So Sambo beat the bitch!”

This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.

“It was kind of disgusting,” Lucille, who is part Aboriginal, said in a phone interview after admitting that she is frightened of being discovered telling folks in the “lower 48” about life near the North Pole.

Then, almost with a sigh, she added, “But that’s just Alaska.”

Unfortunately, it may not be just Alaska or even Sarah Palin and her “friends” on the Christian Nationalist/Neo-Confederacy side of the political spectrum who share these crude racist sentiments regarding Barack Obama (h/t the field negro):

Let us swing the door ajar and invite the elephant into the room. One big reason Barack Obama is locked in a tight race, rather than easily outdistancing his opponent, is because he is black.

That factor is rarely discussed in polite political conversation. People tend to dance around it, talking instead about Obama’s perceived inexperience, or his youth, or his perceived airs, or his liberal voting record. And racist sentiment rarely shows up in the polls, because a lot of people don’t want to share their baser instincts with the pollsters; they’ll save that instead for the privacy of the voting booth.

But the incremental evidence – anecdotal and even statistical – has become impossible to ignore.

Union organizers in the key state of Michigan complain in the press that, as one puts it, “we’re all struggling to some extent with the problem of white workers who will not vote for Obama because of his color.” An aging mine electrician from Kentucky is quoted as saying, “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs.” An elderly woman in a New Jersey hair salon is overheard complaining about Barack and Michelle Obama the other day, about how blacks supposedly have larger bones than whites, and about how she’s fleeing America if Obama wins. […]

… Case in point, Pennsylvania. On the day of the Democratic presidential primary, 12 percent of the white Democratic voters told the exit pollsters that race mattered in their choice of candidate; of those whites, 76 percent chose Hillary Rodham Clinton over Obama. The same pattern surfaced in other states, including the key autumn state of Ohio.

This is worth pondering a moment longer. If 12 percent of Democratic voters are willing to tell exit pollsters, eye to eye, that race was an important factor, to Obama’s detriment, isn’t it fair to assume that the real percentage (including those who kept their sentiments private) was actually higher? And what might this portend for the general election, when the white electorate will be broader, and hence significantly less liberal, than in Democratic contests?

. . . Last June, the Washington Post-ABC News poll devised a “racial sensitivity index,” based on a series of nuanced questions that were designed to measure the varying levels of racial prejudice in the white electorate. The pollsters came up with three categories, ranging from most to least enlightened. The key finding: Whites in the least-enlightened category – roughly 30 percent of the white electorate – favored John McCain over Obama by a ratio of 2-1.

So what is the true power of Sarah Palin’s and McCain’s appeal? Why are they doing better than expected in the polls despite 8 years of Republican corruption, incompetence, lies and failures? I hate to say this of my fellow white Americans, but one very important factor appears to be a quality he possesses which many of them consider immutable, and a deal breaker when it comes to voting for Obama: the color of his skin. Hopefully in the debates this Fall Obama can do well enough to convince some of my fellow whites who are on the fence that the content of his character matters more than their stereotypical view of “his kind.” If not this will be a long and ugly campaign that will remain close enough for the GOP to steal once more through the use of their vaunted “purge the voters who don’t look pale enough” campaigns which have been so effective in 2000 and 2004.

If not, we may hear more stories about Republicans gloating about how they beat “Sambo” this November.