Obama’s real electoral challenge.
by Noemie Emery
On the way to his rendezvous with destiny, Barack Obama consistently lost white voters, especially of the middle and working classes, to Hillary Clinton–voters variously known as Appalachians or Reagan Democrats, rural voters and white ethnics in the industrial states. Because of this, he lost most of the big swing states that a Democrat needs–Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia (which would have made Gore president in 2000 had he won there), that last by a staggering 41 points. Heading into the general election, in which the weight of the black vote will shrink as compared to its importance in the Democratic primaries, this weakness emerged as the prime threat to his promising candidacy and gave birth to two schools of thought on its cause.
School number one thinks it reflects racial hostility that Obama’s opponents–first Hillary Clinton and now John McCain and the Republican party–are doing their best to rub raw. This is a case that Democrats have been making for the past 30-plus years, and its most recent airing came in a long piece in the May 19 Newsweek by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe. “The real test is yet to come,” they warned. “The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower-and-middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower and middle-class whites in industrial and border states–the Democrats’ base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but ‘Reagan Democrats’ in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as ‘the other’–as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots.”In this view–let us call it the Newsweek Doctrine–race is the issue, and the big years in history were 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson did the Right Thing, signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and consigning his party to electoral darkness by losing the South for the next several eons.
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