Horseraceblogging
(posted by Jim Henley)
I’m on deadline for a book review due tomorrow night so for the moment I only have more primary-blogging to offer. More in a day or two. Meantime, my cobloggers continue to put up awesome stuff.
First, in the spirit of Clinton’s much-blogged argument of the other day, let’s be perfectly blunt about discussing the intersection of electoral politics with race and gender. Clinton said, “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”
Now as a white guy who never completed college, I don’t know what’s up with these other bastards, but whatever. And I won’t add to the outrage about the racism Clinton opponents descry in her remarks. Instead, I’ll take the argument of her and her supporters that Clinton is simply calling attention to demographics.
So then. If Obama gets the nomination, he will have to work hard to raise his level of white support. Meanwhile, if Clinton wins the nomination, she’ll have to work hard to restore her level of African-American support, especially since she can only win the nomination by depriving an African-American candidate of the nomination by using pretty cutthroat tactics.
The prime truism of presidential politics is that, post-convention, you need to move to “the center.” One of the things that post-structuralist theory is pretty inarguably correct about is that, in America, “we” define the center as white and male. Nonwhite and non-male are regarded as marginal, the dark outskirts of a creamy vanilla filling.
What this means is that Obama’s need to play for white support dovetails precisely with every candidate’s imperative to “move to the center” as the campaign turns from summer to fall. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton will be needing to pay more attention to currying favor with African-American voters than she has in months: she’ll have to move “away from the center” at the very moment that, classically, a nominee is supposed to be embracing it.
The other reality is that national Democrats never win a majority of white men. They win elections by not losing white men absurdly and racking up huge majorities among minority voters. Hillary Clinton, a Democratic woman, is not going to beat white Republican male John McCain among white men in November. Period. And she’s going to come out of the primary with a very precarious standing among African-Americans.
As they say on TalkLeft, the above isn’t racist, it’s just recognizing reality.
Now, let’s make an allowance I made before elsewhere. If this were any normal election year, Obama would have been toast long since, and the most obviously doomed general-election candidate since George McGovern stood behind Thomas Eagleton “1000 percent.” We’re not just talking about electing America’s first black president. Okay, second, after Hillary’s hubby. That is, we’re not considering some black dude named “Harold Ford” or “Doug Wilder” or “John Smith.” We’re considering a black guy with a funny name to American ears. Whose middle name sounds Muslim in the GWOT era. Who wasn’t even born in the US was reared in the Third World. And is the most “liberal” major-party presidential candidate since Walter Mondale. In the era of American Presidential politics that may or may not now be concluding, that’s a count of like fifty strikes and no balls.
It’s not a normal election year - Iraq, the economy, corruption, the GOP’s stubborn continuing embrace of a despised incumbent, you know the litany. I don’t know if it’s abnormal enough to make Barack Obama the next president. But he’s already gotten further than he would have in “normal” times.
Quick postscript: Another perfectly blunt angle to consider is, who has the greater structural incentives to suck it up and vote for the Dem no matter how bitter they feel, white women or black people? I would say, white women, because of abortion and the Supreme Court. I can’t think of any damage continuing Republican dominance can do to specifically African-American interests that’s as salient as the threat to white women’s interests in reproductive liberty. The Supreme Court really is poised to tip pro-life with another GOP nominee or two.
UPDATE: Silly me. I confused Obama’s schooldays in Indonesia with his birth in Hawaii in draft one of this post.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:59 am
[...] races. If we had any electoral instincts we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves in this position. Nevertheless, I argue that Obama’s comparative weakness with white voters versus Clinton’s comparative [...]
May 11th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
The Democrats are going to win the black vote no matter what. They’ll get a majority of the Hispanic vote, but a lot of them aren’t hot on the son of Aladdin. The real reason why nominating Hillary is a bad idea is because she is one of the most HATED figures in politics today. In head-to-head matchups she’s the one who could lose to McCain, not Obama. Obama has shown he can win lily-white states, and the working class whites will still probably we willing to vote for him if he’s the Dem nominee. In this year it’s pretty much a certainty that the Dems will win, so I would suggest choosing a favored candidate on the basis of who you would like to be President. I choose nobody, or if that’s not possible Hamilton Sandwich.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Since you talk about the tradition of tacking left and then tacking centerwards for the general, it is also interesting that Obama has pretty much been bucking that CW and running “to the center” during the primary season. Does this raise any challenges for his campaign in the general? Or does it make it easier, i.e., he’ll have less primary-general dissonance than other nominees and can just keep doing what he’s been doing. Obama’s approach is another strange thing about this election cycle. You’re totally correct, however, that Hillary would be in a bind about which way to tack, and it’d be fascinating were she the candidate to watch her try to thread the needle.