Posted on 01/13/2008 4:49:26 PM PST by jdm
Barack Obama’s emphatic win in Iowa 10 days ago was widely portrayed as a historic moment in America’s political story. The fact that a black American could win in the overwhelmingly white state of Iowa was seen as a tipping point. But that may prove to be a premature – as well as historically glib – judgment of what took place.
First, it has happened before. Jesse Jackson, who was a much more overtly African-American candidate in 1988 than Mr Obama is now, won 11 primary elections in his ultimately losing bid for the Democratic nomination, including the largely white state of Vermont.
Others, notably Douglas Wilder, the first black governor of Virginia, which was headquarters to the Confederacy during the civil war, flirted with a presidential run in 1992. And in 1996, 80 per cent approval ratings suggested that the White House was Colin Powell’s for the asking. Mr Powell turned the offers down (but not because he believed his skin colour would prevent him from winning).
More importantly, though, the Iowa-breakthrough narrative has already been put into question by what has happened since then. Many attribute Hillary Clinton’s surprise comeback in New Hampshire last week to her emotional interlude in a diner, which some believe helped bring women voters out in droves the following day. Certainly Mrs Clinton won many more female votes in New Hampshire than Mr Obama (46 to 34 per cent) having lost that gender battle to him in Iowa five days earlier.
But a number of pollsters have put out a more disturbing explanation for why they got their New Hampshire forecasts so badly wrong: the so-called “Bradley effect”, named after Tom Bradley, an African-American Democrat who lost California’s gubernatorial race in 1982 after opinion polls showed him leading by a wide margin. A number of highly respected pollsters, including Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, believe New Hampshire’s voters, too, may have said one thing and voted another.
Then there is South Carolina, where the Republicans hold their vote next Saturday (the Democrats vote the following Saturday). Racial controversy in the state, the first in the South to participate in the presidential primaries, is more normally associated with the Republicans. In 2000, George W. Bush retrieved his presidential hopes in South Carolina from the ashes of a New Hampshire defeat two weeks earlier partly by issuing coded racial messages to the state’s overwhelmingly white Republican electorate.
Mr Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which until recently banned interracial dating. Meanwhile, shadowy groups disseminated fliers stating (inaccurately) that John McCain, his rival for the nomination, had fathered an illegitimate black child.
This time round an unlikely racial tension is simmering within the Democratic camp. It is taking place against the backdrop of a Democratic primary in which up to half of voters will be African-American.
Much like Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”, which brought southern white voters over to the Republican party after Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights victories of the 1960s, the messages are implicit yet hard to misinterpret. Take congressman Jesse Jackson Jr’s comments following Mrs Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire last week.
“Those tears have to be analysed,” said Mr Jackson, who, like his father, has endorsed Mr Obama. “They have to be looked at very, very carefully in light of hurricane Katrina, in light of other things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to South Carolina.” Few of South Carolina’s black voters will have missed the implication. Since most of Katrina’s victims were black, Mrs Clinton is therefore presumably unfeeling towards the black community.
There have been other small spats, none of which equate to a Bush-McCain moment but which, taken together, imply that Iowa’s voters may not have had the last word on the subject. That the Clintons – of all people – are being accused of racial insensitivity underlines that America has a long way to go before it moves beyond the tensions of the past.
Crowned as “America’s first black president” by author Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton was still accused last week of using racial undertones when he dismissed as a “fairy tale” Mr Obama’s claim to have spoken out consistently against the Iraq war. Mrs Clinton was also accused of insensitivity after she pointed out that Martin Luther King needed LBJ in order to get civil rights legislation enacted.
Her apparent point was that Mr Obama’s message of “hope” (in whose aid he often cites King) was not enough by itself to bring about the “change” that he promises. The business of politics was also important, she implied. But her point backfired and both Clintons were forced to clarify what they had meant.
As it happens, Martin Luther King day is next Monday – five days before the South Carolina Democratic primary. It was King who said that people should be judged by the content of their character not the colour of their skin (or, indeed, their gender). America would indeed make history if it sent a woman or a black man to the White House. But the main point of an election is what you plan to do after you have won it.
So when an anonymous polster calls instaed of just saying you’ll vote for Hitlery, you lie and say you are going to vote for obambi? I think it’s much more likely to be they were ashamed to say the were voting for Her Thighness.
LOL. I found this an unintentionally very funny comment. Jackson gang getting all over Hillary. Way to go.
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