LESLEY: You know, Hillary gave an interview to USA Today last week, and people are interpreting what she said as race-baiting.

COKIE: Yeah. I think that’s wrong. I really do.

Click here to read the first part of Lesley Stahl’s interview with Cokie Roberts.

LESLEY: Well let’s tell everyone what she said. There was a suggestion that the white vote will never go to Obama. Something like that. So why don’t you think that was race-baiting?

COKIE: Well, because what she was doing was describing what her vote was. And her description was 100 percent accurate. It’s become very difficult in this country to use words like "white." I must say, through this campaign I have found it interesting and disturbing that even though we are happily at a place in our history where it is not appropriate, and considered inappropriate, to say anything negative about race, it is apparently just fine to say things negative about sex. And we certainly saw that in the course of this campaign.

I do think that she probably shouldn’t have used the word she used, but we use these words in talking about the exit polls all the time. She gets the majority of the white vote. She gets an overwhelming majority of the lower income white vote and of voters who have traditionally been up for grabs in the general election.

LESLEY: You know, it’s interesting because if you are at all sympathetic to Sen. Clinton, then you give her the benefit of the doubt. And if you’re really for Obama, you saw race-baiting. It’s interesting.

COKIE: But that’s true about everything now. I mean, it makes me nuts. The truth is that nobody gives anybody the benefit of the doubt. And part of this is the ferocity of the blogosphere — that people are all evil on the other side and they’re all doing something terrible. And that is the way our politics is these days. And Barack Obama might say constantly that he wants to get beyond that and bring people together and all that. But that certainly has not been true of his supporters.

LESLEY: No. Cokie, one last question on this: Do you think there is any chance at all that they would form a ticket together – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton?

COKIE: I think there’s a chance. But I think it would be a really stupid thing for the Democratic Party. I mean, again, if this was the year for the generic white guy, you certainly want him as the vice president — probably a white man, preferably a gun owner, from a swing state. I mean, to have two liberal senators from states that are going to go Democratic anyway …

LESLEY: What about a Hispanic … a Catholic Hispanic governor? There is one.

COKIE: We’re talking Bill Richardson.

LESLEY: Yeah.

COKIE: Well, that could happen.

LESLEY: Yeah.

COKIE: That could happen.

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