If Obama Loses It’s Due to Racism Part II
24 hours after we published a commentary criticizing progressive activists, politicians and journalists for pretending that if Barack Obama loses in November it will be due to racism, RealClearPolitics published a column by Clarence Page who… does exactly that: ‘In fact, if he fails to show at least a six-point advantage in the polls by Election Day, I expect John McCain to be our next president.’
Six percent. Why six percent? Well, Page explains:
I’m no math whiz, but it did not take numerical genius for me to notice that Obama fared best in caucus states, where the voting happens to be conducted in public. Where votes were cast in the privacy of voting booths, Obama tended to do worse than polls predicted. When Obama showed a lead in the polls that fell within the margin of error, it tended to mean a victory for his principal opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
So that’s the reason Obama lost most states in which voters actually had to, um, vote. According to Page, that is.
It’s becoming absolutely ridiculous. For every one person who refuses to vote for Obama because he’s black, there are two or three who vote for him because they believe it’s time that a black man becomes America’s president. Yes, there are many such voters, and they’re not all blacks. A tremendous lot of white people support Obama because they believe electing him would help ‘heal’ America’s racist past, so they have said.
(the number is of course made up – 2 or 3 for 1 – but that doesn’t seem to be a problem these days, considering that Page too is making the 6% up as he goes)
When we look at the primary season, we see that Clinton won states in which the population actually was allowed to vote because she was able to depict Obama as weak, inexperienced, radically liberal, and generally not ready for the presidency. Additionally, she had a better network to get out the vote – mostly because she and her husband built that network 16 years ago already, and kept it in tact.
Obama, on the other hand, was able to get the support of most party activists because he had a more liberal voting record than Clinton did, opposed the Iraq war – or so he said – from the get-go, and so on. He was, in other words, not what blue collar voters wanted, but what progressive activists wanted. For some reason, those activists and their friends in the media are unable to grasp the fact that the far-left ideology they share, is not shared by ‘white America’ (or Asian America, or Hispanic Amerca) .
Lastly, be sure to read this column by Jonah Goldberg. He gives another, very viable explanation for the Bradley effect. As Goldberg writes, why don’t progressives take the following theory seriously; some white voters may say they support a black candidate but vote for another candidate nonetheless, not because they’re racist and trying to hide their racism, but because they simply truly consider the white candidate the better of the two, but are afraid to say so out of fear of being labeled ‘racist.’
Sir, I disagree with you assessment. The people inclined to vote for Obama because they think it’s time America had a black president, or what foreign countries to respect us more, or whatever, are also the people that wouldn’t vote for McCain anyway. They might have voted for McCain in 2000, when he campaigned on character, foreign policy knowledge, and political reform, but they won’t vote for a hard-core warhawk and a Christian evangelical in any possible circumstances (they might vote McCain-Palin against Hitler-Satan, but one’s dead and the other doesn’t exist so it might be a better choice after all).You can also make the case that, likewise, these racists wouldn’t vote Democratic anyway. That’s a tougher row to hoe, though, since in 1992 Clinton did very well in some pretty white Southern states that don’t look to be going for Obama at all (winning AR, KY, TN, MO and LA, and coming close in NC and FL). Of course, no one thinks that the difference is entirely due to racism, but I suspect it’s one of many factors.Further, trying to track the effects of racism on a political campaign is difficult, largely because racism in this day and age isn’t usually overt, and may in fact be subconscious. I imagine fewer people tell themselves now that they’d never vote for a black man for office than ever in American history, but there’s still a lot of racial prejudice lurking beneath the surface. Nine times out of ten when someone says, "I’m not a racist but…" the next thing out of their mouth is a racist statement. These people may be willing to vote for an abstract black man, but when actually presented with one as a candidate they may raise questions about his character, experience, trustworthiness, "likeability", etc. No one questions McCain’s likeability, even though everything we know about him suggests that he has a very bad temper.I don’t think racism will end up deciding this race for McCain, however, for the simple reason that Obama isn’t very black. Sure, he has dark skin, African ancestry, and a black wife and family, but he doesn’t talk or dress like a stereotypical black man, and the mother, grandmother, and grandfather he talks about are all white. He doesn’t seem to eat much "soul food", listen to rap music, curse, or worry about seeming cool and with it. He’s a different kind of black man, like Tony Dungy, Michael Jordan, or Condi Rice. I imagine that, when all is said and done, voters will judge him on his character, knowledge, and policy, not on whether or not they think he’s a nigger.
The idea that "black-sympathizers" will outnumber and/or cancel out racists on election day is pretty far fetched if you ask me. However, I largely agree with your assessment about the different reasons people have for voting against Obama (primarily moderate democrats and independents) but I do think racism will play a significant role amongst the ultra-liberal crowd that normally would’ve supported the democratic candidate under different circumstances. I can only tell you about my own personal experience but I am seeing a MAJOR disconnect between the polls and what people are saying… a disconnect that is impossible to overstate. To give you some background… I’m a 28 year old white guy living in Los Angeles. I have many ultra-liberal friends that some would consider to be "leftist activists" (all chicks) although I am a strictly a conservative-leaning moderate. Most pollsters automatically assume that these people are "in it for Obama" but that couldn’t be further from the truth. These people I speak of are young (in their twenties) and have voted for democrats as long as they’ve been able to vote (which hasn’t been long but is all they’ve ever known in the political world). Many of them volunteered to work for John Kerry’s campaign in ‘04 but not a single one of them has volunteered for Obama. I’d say at least 80% of them (no joke, maybe more) tell me that they are NOT really enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy and secretly plan to vote against him because they "do not trust him"… which would be perfectly acceptable… that is, if they didn’t completely share his ideology and agree with all of his policies. They tell pollsters the exact opposite because they don’t want the pollster to assume that they are racist (which quite frankly is easy to do when you’re an ultra-liberal democrat that plans to vote republican in ‘08 because you "do not trust" the black guy). These are people that are supposedly open-minded "die-hard Obama supporters" but when you press them, you find out their minds aren’t so open and their support is superficial. Believe it or not but if this kind of thing is happening in a liberal stronghold like LA, amongst the young crowd of supposed avid Obama supporters, what’s going on in the rest of the country in more conservative areas with older voters? The exact same thing except to a much larger degree (especially in crucial battleground states like Pennsylvania and Michigan). Not all of them claim that "they don’t trust Obama". They site many different reasons, some legitimate and some not so much. A few of the chicks have told me that they want to see Palin become the first female VP, others have told me that they do not want to replace Bill Clinton as the face of the party, some have bought into the internet rumors about Obama (that he’s a closet Muslim, connected to terrorism, anti-American, etc..) and some have given in to what I call the "Schadenfreude Effect". They are angry at the democratic leadership (i.e. Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and Harry Reid) for blatantly supporting Obama over Hilary in the primaries. They feel like the Clinton family was disrespected and insulted and they aren’t taking kindly to it. They plan on punishing the democratic party in hopes that if they lose badly enough on election day, the party will shake up their leadership. Who knows whether that will actually happen or not but that’s the theory. To another point, at this time in ‘04, my neighborhood was covered with John Kerry signs. I am not kidding when I say that this year there is only 1 Obama sign in my entire neighborhood… only 1! Obviously people in this area are nowhere close to as enthusiastic about him as the mainstream media would have you believe. In actuality, the democrats I’ve talked to have seemed resigned to defeat on election day… and oddly enough, are optimistic about the prospects. Hey, perhaps I’m dead wrong. Perhaps all of these people are actually lying to me rather than the pollsters but for some reason, I don’t think that’s the case (not all of them have talked to pollsters but some of them have). The people that continually deny this, from both parties, are likely in for a rude awakening on election day. This doesn’t mean that a McCain win won’t be legitimate, it just means that a significant number of democrats will do what the media assumed was impossible and will vote republican in ‘08, in the aftermath of the Bush-era… some for valid reasons and others not so much.