This sort of sentiment may be par for the course in the Democratic Party, but it's also racist and un-American,

"The e-mail from, Steven Ybarra, a California superdelegate who heads the voting-rights committee of the DNC Hispanic Caucus, was sent to fellow caucus members in the hours after word broke that Solis Doyle - the most prominent Latina in Clinton's campaign - would be replaced by another close Clinton loyalist, Maggie Williams, who is black.

The e-mail noted that Clinton, who is looking to Latino voters for a boost in the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, scored heavily with Hispanics in her California win.

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

Ybarra told The Post yesterday that the loss of Solis Doyle, a child of Mexican immigrants, just weeks before the Texas primary, where 36 percent of the population is Hispanic, was "dumb as a stump."

If you read between the lines, what Ybarra is really saying is that even if Doyle isn't getting the job done, only a Hispanic can represent other Hispanics and that Solis Doyle should be allowed to keep her job solely because she's Hispanic. That's the sort of blatantly racist reasoning that you'd expect to hear from a member of the Ku Klux Klan, not from a supposedly reputable pol who's actually going to be allowed to help decide who the Democratic nominee will be in 2008.

Moreover, it's exactly that kind of thinking that turns nations like Afghanistan into squabbling hellholes. When people start putting their ethnic identities above everything else, nothing good comes of it. That's something that Democrats should have learned from slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the other racist policies they foisted on this country in the past. Having different ethnic groups of people advocating racist ideas as opposed to having white Democrats advocating them isn't an improvement.