Race And The Obama Campaign

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

January 14, 2008

When the candidates for president say they want to bring "change" to the White House, not a one of them, in either party, could pull off the change an Obama presidency could bring.

A black man as president of the United States? It's hard to top that for change. Up until now Obama's blackness has been treated by most political commentators as more of a curiosity than a central campaign issue. But the New Hampshire results provided a jarring reality check. Racism may be muted in the United States, but it's still with us a fact of political life.

One of the first campaigns I worked on as a political consultant was a special election for Congress in Alaska. My candidate was an Athabascan Indian. Every poll we had in that campaign showed us with a 10 point or better lead. But we lost. It was my first lesson that poll respondents don't volunteer their prejudice when being interviewed. Years later I worked with Doug Wilder in Virginia. Again we had strong poll numbers. But when Virginians voted it took a recount to confirm Wilder's election as governor.

There are so many examples of black candidates not running as strongly as their poll numbers that poll takers routinely build in a discount factor to their results when weighting actual interviews. That's a significant little secret most people didn't know until the polling firms scrambled to explain the New Hampshire results.

In Iowa, Obama actually ran better than advance polling suggested. But Iowa didn't have an election in the traditional sense. No one in Iowa's caucuses could vote by secret ballot and hide their prejudices.

Since New Hampshire, many have been tip-toeing around the obvious truth: race determined the outcome. The race-based vote wasn't large, but it was enough to tip the balance and to breathe new life into the Clinton campaign.

In South Carolina, race is front and center. Clinton and Obama have been openly competing for the black vote, and as that state's January 19 election nears, the majority of the state's black voters are lining up behind Obama. In fact, one of Obama's claims on the presidential nomination is that he can bring out enough black voters in November to turn some southern states blue.

The racial divide that still exists in the U.S. is recognized more by blacks than whites. Responding to a CNN poll conducted about this time last year, 49 percent of the blacks interviewed said racism is a "very serious" problem, while only 18 percent of whites shared that view.

When TV shows reach out to interview black leaders they invariably call on Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or Andrew Young as the most recognizable voices on racial issues. Significantly, not a one of them is supporting Obama. Young is backing Clinton; Jackson and Sharpton haven't declared for either candidate.

Shelby Steele, a black academic who has written widely about race relations, was interviewed by Bill Moyers on Moyers' PBS Journal last week and expressed the opinion that the Obama phenomenon is threatening to the nation's civil rights leadership. That leadership, he argues, derives much of its power from the angry chip many blacks carry on their shoulders from centuries of abuse.

Steele characterizes the Obama message as a new bargain with the white community that goes like this: you forget I'm black and I'll forget you're a racist.

If Obama's message succeeds, says Steele, the old civil rights leadership will lose the power that comes through confrontation.

Beyond the familiar leadership faces, race is very much a factor for ordinary black voters. For most of 2007 black voters were reluctant to jump on Obama's bandwagon simply because they felt he had no chance to win and were concerned with what an Obama campaign might do to distort racial relations.

But something happened after Iowa. When Bill Clinton characterized the Obama campaign as a "fairy tale," that was widely interpreted in the black community as Clinton dismissing the idea that a black can be elected president. That's an idea with a lot of currency among blacks, but it landed on them harshly when a prominent white---particularly Bill Clinton---said it. Clinton has been scrambling ever since to attribute other meanings to his comment.

Then Hillary Clinton compounded her husband's error by suggesting that Lyndon Johnson had more to do with passage of landmark civil rights legislation than Martin Luther King. Her statement, along with Bill Clinton's are readily explainable in non-racist terms, but both comments swim in a sea of electro-charged sensitivity serving to bond black voters to Obama, just as we are witnessing the first indications of white flight away from him.

The idea of a mixed race, former community organizer from the Chicago streets, with a middle name identical to Iraq's former dictator, rising to take on and defeat entrenched political power and be the leader of the free world could well be considered a fairy tale. One that could melt old ideas of what's possible in American politics, and, quite possibly, what's possible in American government.

That would be change like this nation has seldom seen. It's making a lot of people, both whites and blacks, very anxious. But there's no escaping the fact that race is emerging from the shadows of this campaign and over the next few weeks it will likely determine the Democratic nomination, and possibly the presidency.

Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.