Among the Americans I know, real Americans, hardworking Americans, white Americans, black Americans, and every shade in between, there is a terrible sadness about the Clintons’ racist, take no prisoners bid for the Presidency.

In the middle class neighborhood where I live, we have strived to live respectfully, even harmoniously with each other. The sixth grade teacher raising her adopted daughter from China, the distinguished "Wasp" octogenarian couple whose failing health and eyesight worry us all, the gay Latino engineer who works at a technology company with plummeting stock prices, his partner who works for an airline that is going bust, the Muslim family from Pakistan who live quietly in collective purdah so as not to offend anyone, the industrious, ambitious African-American family with children settled in three top colleges, the elderly grandmother from Bosnia who ritually boasts about the future of her American grandchildren, the artist across the street who cobbles a living out of part-time work, the man on disability who disappears a little each day from lack of comprehensive health insurance, the woman with a brain tumor, happy as a lark, because her son is back from Iraq, are just some of the sixty families who have found a way to co-exist peacefully, respect each other, and search for commonality. We are not so different from each other, we found. We're all worried about the war, about the economy, about our jobs, our children's future, our health, our retirement. We are something close to a tribe, a neo-American tribe stitched together from people of every background.

We would never consider saying the hurtful, racist bile Hillary and Bill Clinton have spewed since the beginning of their campaign to install Mrs. Clinton in the White House. The America we know is better than Hillary and Bill and their unenlightened race baiting. It’s time for the Clintons to stop wrecking this country’s slow, plodding, but inevitable post-modern march towards raceless meritocracy, and return to 1950s Arkansas--where they evidently still live.

Gail Vida Hamburg, author of The Edge of the World, has a forthcoming novel, Liberty Landing, inspired by John Dos Passos' USA, his trilogy about America. Look for Liberty Landing from Mirare Press www.mirarepress.com in Fall 2008.