What people say on the opinion pages of our nations’s most prestigious newspapers has little to no effect on the outcome of elections. This is something that Republicans understand and Democrats often forget. It doesn’t really matter what Gail Collins or Fred Hiatt think, nor does it matter much what George Will or Bob Herbert think…not for elections, anyway. But it does matter what elite opinion thinks for how history is written and for how our nation’s political meta-narratives get disseminated down and out into the larger political conversations. And that does have an affect on how elections turn out and on people’s permanent legacy.

George W. Bush has been a bad president, but even if he had not, his legacy would still be sullied by the nasty campaign he ran against John McCain in South Carolina. Likewise, the Clintons are now almost certainly going to lose any battle to exonerate themselves in the history books of running one of the nastiest race-based campaigns in recent memory.

All you have to do is look at the papers to see that a consensus is forming among the opinion makers.

Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post:

As a rationale for why Democratic Party superdelegates should pick her over Obama, it’s a slap in the face to the party’s most loyal constituency — African Americans — and a repudiation of principles the party claims to stand for. Here’s what she’s really saying to party leaders: There’s no way that white people are going to vote for the black guy. Come November, you’ll be sorry.

How silly of me. I thought the Democratic Party believed in a colorblind America…

These are white Democrats we’re talking about, voters who generally share the party’s philosophy. So why would these Democrats refuse to vote for a nominee running on Democratic principles against a self-described conservative Republican? The answer, which Clinton implies but doesn’t quite come out and say, is that Obama is black — and that white people who are not wealthy are irredeemably racist.

New York Times Editorial Board:

…we believe just as strongly that Mrs. Clinton will be making a terrible mistake — for herself, her party and for the nation — if she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with disturbing racial undertones…

…We endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and we know that she has a major contribution to make. But instead of discussing her strong ideas, Mrs. Clinton claimed in an interview with USA Today that she would be the better nominee because a recent poll showed that “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” She added: “There’s a pattern emerging here.”

Yes, there is a pattern — a familiar and unpleasant one. It is up to Mrs. Clinton to change it if she hopes to have any shot at winning the nomination or preserving her integrity and her influence if she loses.

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

The Democratic Party can’t celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender…

…To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical “the black guy can’t win but the white girl can” is — well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.

“She has unleashed the gates of hell,” a longtime party leader told me. “She’s saying, ‘He’s not one of us.'”

Los Angeles Times Editorial Board:

With the electoral math against her, Clinton is left with just two arguments for her viability, neither of them good. The first is that delegates from Florida and Michigan should be counted. They should not. Those states violated party rules by moving up their primaries, and the candidates agreed not to contest them. To seat those delegates would clearly change the rules in mid-game. Her second appeal is to the party’s superdelegates, urging them to overrule the will of voters and to back her instead. On that point, we agree that superdelegates should vote their conscience, but to do so in such a way as to deny the nomination of the first serious African American candidate in history on behalf of one who has shown no greater appeal to voters would be politically dangerous folly.

Stripped of those two bad arguments, Clinton has none left to make. She has run a fine race, but she has lost.

I don’t even think it is possible to change this narrative once it sets in. History will record it this way, and there’s not much the Clinton’s can do about it now. It’s incredibly sad.