ShareThisObama and Racial Voting
There is a new and (no matter whom you support) disturbing CW dominating analysis of the Democratic nominating contest at the moment. It's that Obama is becoming the "black candidate," repelling the white and brown voters who will determine the ultimate outcome. Indeed, this point of view is feeding the Clinton campaign's efforts to downplay an expected Obama win in South Carolina this Saturday. After all (suggest the pundits, not the Clintons), SC is just about black folks, who won't matter down the road. Typically, Dick Morris is the bluntest in publicly presenting this point of view, but I can tell you, it's endemic in the DC chattering classes.
Totally aside from the corrosive effect of such race-based political assumptions--including the planted axiom that white and Latino voters don't want to be on the same bandwagon as African-Americans--they strike me as a being over-simplistic from even a cold, amoral perspective. Here's a new flash for the punditocracy: there are African-Americans who live in states other than South Carolina.
A case in point: the most under-discussed story about the Nevada Caucuses was that (according to the entrance polls) the African-American vote was a large as the Latino vote. Among the latter, it was widely reported that Clinton won by a little better than two-to-one. But among the former, Obama won by better than five-to-one. And lest we forget, Clinton was running even with or even ahead of Obama among African-Americans nationally until very recently.
In the February 5 states, African-American voters will almost certainly outnumber Latinos in a majority of states, will be crucial in quite a few (e.g., Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, New Jersey, Delaware, plus Obama's own Illinois) and will be a significant factor in others, including California. If Obama's margins among black voters match what he won in Nevada--not a bad bet, given the "racialization" of the campaign--then he can lose white and Latino voters substantially and still be competitive.
In other words, it's not all that clear which candidate would ultimately benefit from a "racialization" of the nominating contest. And to use Mickey Kaus' infelicitous term, Obama's "ghetto" may be bigger than the pundits realize.
I fear (and fear is the right word) that the Clinton racialization strategy will backfire. The obverse of the notion that whites and latinos won't support a candidate who is both actually black and is seen as the "black candidate"; is the possibility that blacks will not support a candidate whom they see as uniting those groups against them, in the general election. If the GOP were to nominate Giuliani or Romney, I think most black voters would hold their noses and vote for the Clintons no matter how offended they are by the Clinton's marginalizing strategy. But it is now much more likly that the GOP will nominate McCain, and he is not associated with racial politics. The whole Clinton strategy assumes that black voters won't have anywhere else to go no matter how much they are marginalized and taken for granted. But they just might stay home on election day, and if that happens no Democrat can win the White House back.