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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Habemus Obama?

When a new Pope is selected by the College of Cardinals, the public announcement is made, "Habemus Papum" (we have a Pope). After Obama's convincing win in Wisconsin, it looks like habemus Obama for the Democratic nominee. He doesn't have the delegate majority yet. But, as Tom Hayden observes in We Have a Nominee! Huffington Post 02/19/08:

What about Hillary Clinton's "firewall" states of Ohio and Texas? When the balance of forces shifts in a competition, when the general offensive is on, little can hold it back. Wavering voters shift their allegiances. Donors defect. The calculation of electability shifts. The old leadership is staggered, off balance, the ground collapsing under their feet. Even if Clinton wins in Ohio and Texas, the margins will not be enough to block his momentum.

Josh Marshall, focusing a bit more narrowly on the electoral demographics, concurs (Gut Check Time TPM 02/20/08):

The premise of Clinton's campaign after Super Tuesday has been her trump cards of female voters and working class/lower income Democrats. But that assumption is due for a major reevaluation. In each successive contest he's cutting more into those core constituencies. Tonight in Wisconsin Obama tied Hillary among female voters and beat her by 10 points among voters making less than $50,000 per annum.

We've had four big post-Super Tuesday primaries - in LA, MD, VA and WI. The topline numbers in each were relatively similar - ranging from 17% in Wisconsin to 29% in Virginia. But the underlying story is that from Louisiana to the Chesapeake to Wisconsin, the underlying demographic structure of the electorate, the playing field, as it were, got better for her. But it didn't help.

That bold Maverick McCain, faithful friend of the Christian Right, is already leveling his attacks at Obama.

For instance, the Maverick mocks Obama's visionary speeches as consisting of platitudes. Given what's already out there and what's coming in the months ahead, I certainly hope Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is wrong when he says, "Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter." (A Clinton Surrogate, A Dem Divide? by Dominico Monenaro MSNBC 02/20/08) And if you think that was a rough line from Buffenbarger, you're probably better off avoiding all news of the Presidential election until mid-November 2008. Because we ain't seen nothin' yet.

And no one should kid themselves about the ugly racial politics that have already been percolating up from the Republican id. The invaluable Bob Somerby has been following how the Establishment media has been quick to conjure up racial politics out of any allusion to voter demographics by the Clinton campaign. Most national political reporters regard Clinton as the Wicked Witch, so those mostly fake accusations of "playing the race card" have been directed at her, while parallel observations by the Obama camp have not been so regarded.

But now that their Wicked Witch is looking vanquished, the "press corps" will quickly begin slotting Obama into their standard mold for Democratic Presidential candidates: a flip-flopper, weak on national defense, effeminate, unsure of his own identity, lacking a coherent message. While Maverick McCain's ditziest ramblings will be treated as evidence of his sterling principles.

One of the most idiotic comments I've ever heard from a Big Pundit came from Newsweek's Jon Meacham in his Meet the Press appearance of 01/20/08:

MS. NORRIS: I mean, they [the Republicans] actually will talk openly about bringing Barack Obama down a few notches because they want to run against Hillary.

MR. MEACHAM: Because it's a known known, to give Secretary - former Secretary Rumsfeld his due. Hillary Clinton, they know what to do. Barack Obama, how do you run against the first African American nominee? It explodes all conventional campaign dogma in ways that completely will surprise and pleasantly and unpleasantly perhaps as they go forward. And I that that that's the - one of the things that's so scary about Obama to Republicans is they don't how to run against him. (my emphasis)

As I said at the time, the national Republican Party has been campaigning against black people since 1964. That's how they made the states of the former Confederacy their main base, by attracting the segregationist vote to the Republican Party through their "Southern Strategy" which everyone knew they were persuing but they always officially denied having.

We're already seeing how the press and Republican partisans are working to keep the race issue in play. Currently, the press script for the issue is that the Wicked Witch Hillary Clinton has been using race to polarize white voters against Obama. But now that Clinton's prospects for the nomination are rapidly receding, before you know it we'll be hearing about the Obama campaign is cynically "playing the race card" and unfairly accusing St. McCain the great Maverick and his new, improved Republican Party of racism.

Here are a few samples of the current state of play of the race issue. Carolyn Lochhead, a faithful reporter of conventional press wisdom, recently wrote about how Obama's candidacy shakes up racial politics San Francisco Chronicle 02/17/08. These are paragraphs two through four:

It was former President Bill Clinton who called the racial divide "America's constant curse" in his second inaugural address 11 years ago.

But it was after Bill Clinton injected race into the South Carolina primary last month that African Americans, one of the Democratic Party's most important voting blocs, abandoned his wife's candidacy in droves.

Obama's novelty is not that he is the first black candidate for president, but the first black candidate who is not running as a black candidate. Obama has scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping, yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match.

As Bob Somerby has been known to say, gaze on the empty soul of your press corps.

Yes, in the strange and alien world on which Carolyn Lochhead report as they practice their arcane version of journalism, it was vile, racist Bill Clinton who "injected race into the South Carolina primary". Now, here in the world most of us mere mortals inhabit, it was the mainstream press corps who applied some bizarre, mystical reading of various comments by the hated Clintons to declare they were "injecting race" into the Presidential contest. True, Bill Clinton's remark after the South Carlina primary comparing Obama's win there to Jesse Jackson's in a previous contest could be twisted with somewhat less difficulty into a remark "injecting race", though that was scarcely a legitimate interpretation.

But, according to Lochhead, Obama in his contest against the Wicked Witch has "scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping". But then she continues in the same sentence to say, "yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match". After all the talk about the "Bradley effect" in which white voters are thought to be reluctant to admit to pollsters that they are voting against an African-American candidate, now it's obvious to Lochhead that being African-American is an advantage for Obama, "an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match".

Yes, that's how reality looks to our sad excuse for a press corps. When the vile, awful Clintons even mention something about Obama's appeal to black voters, that's obviously racist campaigning. Yet as the Obama's campaign against St. McCain is appearing as the most likely shape of the Presidential general election, it's obvious, people, that Obama race is a key part of his appeal! And, no, writing such wildly contradictory things in two successive paragraphs doesn't seem to bother this unique group of people who report on our political campaigns. And, yes, it's hard to see how democracy can survive a press corps this broken over the long run.

You get the drift of Lochhead's sad report. One last quote from it also illustrates the modus operandi of our press corps:

It seems odd that during a time of war and terrorism, a mortgage crisis, health care worries and a teetering economy, that race would assert itself. Last summer, the Democratic contest seemed destined to focus on Iraq. Instead, it has become a lesson in demography.

If a report was being written about Planet Earth, it would say instead that during a time of war and terrorism, etc., the political press corps and punditocracy would obsess about race in the way they have. But in the world of press conventional wisdom, race asserted itself. It wasn't inserted by a badly broken press corps, oh no.

Here's rightwing hack Jonah Goldberg's take on it from last week: Obama's rhetoric, American realities Los Angeles Times 02/12/08:

There's more than a little truth here. It seems that Barack Obama can win blacks and that he can win whites; where he has trouble, electorally speaking, is winning blacks and whites.

You wouldn't know this from all the resplendent rhetoric about Obama's gorgeous mosaic of a campaign. Indeed, the audacity of Obama's hype is a marvel to behold.

No, that doesn't really make sense as analysis of the real world. But, remember, today's Republicans regard Rush Limbaugh the OxyContin Man and Mad Annie Coulter as sensible political pundits.

What good Republicans white folks are likely to take from columns like this is something along the lines of, "I wouldn't vote against a candidate because he's black. But I'm also going to stand bravely against the pressure of Political Correctness that expects me to vote for Obama because he's black. And that's obviously how he's campaigning."

Jonah tells us that "let the record show, there is a powerful thirst for a post-racial America, not least among conservatives." (my emphasis) Do I see a column on the "liberal plantation" hatching in the man's narrow little mind? Check this out:

Perhaps rather than serving to heal America's racial wounds, maybe Obama's campaign is more like a dye marker that helps us better diagnose the complexity of the problem.

Obama has had his greatest success winning white votes in states that are nearly all white, particularly those with caucuses. In non-homogeneously white states, he's only won when he's added enormous shares of black votes to his prosperous white liberal base - as he did in South Carolina.

For quite a while, I've been talking about Republican "neosegregationism". But this stuff is so much like the "oldo" version, just plain old "segregationist" is probably more accurate. (Translation for polite Yankees who prefer to believe the best of Republican white folks: "whites who actually know what those people are like wouldn't vote for one of 'em.")

Then there's is the ultimate hack, Dear Leader Bush's favorite historian - who else - Victor Davis Hanson. He writes in The Candidate, Starring Barack Obama Tribune Media Services (dated 02/18/08 at VDH's home page, but was published as early as 02/14/08) that Obama is a big phony because he's only half black but he's pretending to be black because, you know, being black is such a big advantage for a Presidential candidate due to the Political Correctness pressure to vote for him. Pressure before which all good, brave, conservative non-conformists and individuals will refuse to bow, of course. Here's Vic:

Obama's father was from Kenya, and he grew up for a time in Indonesia. But, otherwise, Obama was raised by his white mother and grandparents in a middle-class suburb in Hawaii - a unique upbringing in the 1970s but hardly so in today's multiracial and itinerant America.

At private school, he was sometimes known as Barry. Perhaps had he taken the name of his maternal family who raised him - Dunham - a Sen. Barry Dunham of mixed ancestry from Illinois would now not be causing quite the same sensation.

Indeed, a Sen. Dunham may have been viewed as a minority candidate to the same limited degree that a similar staid-sounding Gov. Bill Richardson resonated as a Mexican American.

For those who aren't up on their oldie movies, The Candidate of Vic's title is a movie in which Robert Redford plays a Senate candidate who is a big old phony.

The fall campaign is taking shape.

Tags: barack obama, carolyn lochhead, jon meachem, jonah goldberg, race, victor davis hanson

posted at 3:29:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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