The Big Race - Obama and the psychology of the color barrier

The issue of race is the longest-lasting cleavage in American politics. It is also perhaps the least understood. The open exploitation of racist sentiment by vote-hungry politicians was for centuries a durable American tradition. More recently, race has assumed a subtle, often unspoken form during campaign season, as Republicans have sought white votes by slyly associating their Democratic opponents with controversial black figures like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or with topics--welfare, crime, federal funding for "midnight basketball"--that many voters identify with African Americans.

Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election.

What role, exactly, will that be? No one knows for sure, but the field of political psychology offers some clues. In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections--even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate--so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country's first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.

If you were born before 1970 or if you read public-opinion polls, then you cannot doubt the profound transformation wrought by the civil rights era. In 1944, the National Opinion Research Center asked whether "Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job, or [whether] white people should have the first chance at any kind of job"--and 55 percent still thought white people should have the "first chance." By 1972, only 3 percent thought so. But some academics--noting the bitterness of battles over busing, affirmative action, and aid to cities, as well as the evolution of the GOP into a virtually all-white party--reasoned that racial prejudice remained, even if it was no longer overtly expressed. They believed it had simply changed form. Their challenge was to define and to demonstrate the existence of this new racism.

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Obama's connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which exploded into the news after the Ohio primary, may do lasting damage to his candidacy by undermining his attempt to transcend race. Wright's words tie Obama to the stereotype of the angry, hostile--and also unpatriotic--black who is seen as hating both whites and white America. Wright turns Obama into a "black candidate" like Jackson or Sharpton. And, as a black candidate, Obama falls prey to a set of stereotypes about black politicians.
In the end, the lesson of political psychology for Democrats is not to avoid nominating black candidates. It is simply to understand that America's racial history continues to influence the calculations of voters--sometimes near the forefronts of their minds, sometimes in the deep recesses of their unconscious.

For years on this forum I have been posting my belief that Tip O'Neill had it wrong: All politics is not local, and America all politics is racial.

the rest of the article confirms what I have said in post from last week, especially the part about the surviving rationale of liberalism is their belief that we are racist and they are not. Here the author betrays that liberalism will never let go of this notion no matter how deep they have to mine the subconscious to dig up pseudoscience to justify it.

Here is the bulk of my post from May 9. I reproduce it here while I consider whether I should accuse Mr. Judis of plagiarism of my idea:

Yes Obama is an empty suit but he is actually more than that, he is a candidate who is African American and this racial reality entirely disguises the fact that the suit is empty. In fact, it was always better for Obama's campaign for the suit to be empty.

The American left, indeed the international left, is a hodgepodge of mutually inconsistent plans and programs which history has demonstrated cannot work. Leftists persist in their leftism because they believe that they are smarter than everybody else. Which really means," I am smarter than all the leftists who've come before and failed with this idea." The glue which holds leftism together when it should splinter apart because of its mutually inconsistent precepts, because it has shopped the entire country to ravening special-interest groups, is their idea that Republicans/conservatives are racists and they are not.

As long as we are racists and they are not, the left need not face up to its own looniness. This is why the left reacts so vehemently to politically incorrect racist remarks.... The coin of this political race card is white guilt.

Now comes Obama. As one black writer has pointed out, he has made a tacit deal with white liberal America: you support me blindly and I will in turn refrain from rubbing America's nose in its history of slavery and segregation. You can expiate your white guilt by voting for me. But Obama has to hold up his end of the deal, he must not rub our noses in our sins like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al. As long as he was seen to be an empty suit-offering no reproach to America-we were comfortable with him.

Now comes The Right Reverend Wright. He has broken the deal. This is why Obama had to disown him. Wright rubs our noses in racism. To a conservative his crazy allegations are so bizarre that it makes not much sense and doesn't change the equation. We don't buy into this AIDS in Africa business, for example. But for a liberal, Reverend Wright's allegations are not bizarre but actually within the realm of intellectual respectability. We can dismiss them, but the left cannot because much of it comes right out of their own catechism.

What about the great mass in the middle? The moderates, the undecideds, the people who don't follow politics until after Labor Day, the folks who permit the likes of Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey to persuade them, what about them, the people who actually decide our elections? These decent folks don't want to be racists. They are always looking for a savior because they will tell you, "I always vote for the man." They shrink from the very idea of voting based on ideology. So an empty suit is no problem for them as long as he is also a savior. Obama was a savior. More, he was an empty vessel into which we could pour all of our yearnings and our simplistic hopes about the political process.

Now this illusion has been shattered by the right Reverend Wright and it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can put Humpty Dumpty's pieces back together again.

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