The Daily Background

I can’t express how pissed I’ve been at most of the media for promoting the “why on earth isn’t Barack Obama garnering more black support than Hillary?!?!?!?!” meme. We’ve all heard pundits and reporters repeating this asinine question.

It’s pretty much racist, when you really think about it. “Obama is black! Why aren’t all black people automatically supporting Obama?!??!” Well, so what? Hillary Clinton is a woman– why aren’t all women supporting her? Bill Richardson is Hispanic, why aren’t all the Hispanic people in the country lining up to support him?

You will never hear the media ask these questions. But they insist on asking “the black question” of Barack.

To assume that the sole litmus test that African Americans apply to Presidential politics, or politics in general, is race, is to make an awful expectation. African American voters are just like white voters, Hispanic voters, middle eastern voters, Native American voters, and everybody else. They’re interested in where candidates stand on the issues, not on what the candidate’s race is. To assume that African American voters, unlike every other voter demographic, are, shallow, stupid, and unsophisticated enough to only care about race is just plain wrong.

Here’s the good news. This stupid media meme may be near death.

Is this because the media has suddenly realized that it’s soft bigotry to expect that African American voters are stupid and only care about the race of the candidates running for President? Sadly, no. Instead, this meme may die simply because the poll numbers are changing.

The new Washington Post/ABC poll includes some analysis about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the African American vote. I quote from the WaPo:

The opening stages of the campaign for the 2008 Democratic nomination have produced a noticeable shift in sentiment among African American voters, who little more than a month ago heavily supported New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton but now favor the candidacy of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.
[…]
Clinton’s and Obama’s support among white voters changed little since December, but the changes among African American Democrats were dramatic. In December and January Post-ABC News polls, Clinton led Obama among African Americans by 60 percent to 20 percent. In the new poll, Obama held a narrow advantage among blacks, 44 percent to 33 percent.

The shift came in spite of the fact that African Americans view Clinton in overwhelmingly positive terms. In both surveys, more than four in five blacks said they had a favorable impression of the New York senator, whose husband was and remains extraordinarily popular in the African American community.

To understand the up-until-now strong African American support for Hillary Clinton, you must understand that this is largely legacy support. It’s not because of things that she has done to get support, it’s rather things that her husband did while he was President. Many African Americans trust that Hillary would continue her husband’s legacy of helping African Americans more than probably any other President since Lincoln.

And a great deal of the support among African Americans that Hillary has is for the same reason that she has a great deal of white support, or support among any other racial demographic: she’s ahead in the polls and people think she has a good chance of winning. And they sure as hell don’t want to wind up with another Republican in the White House. Barack meanwhile, was largely unknown, with less than 50% name recognition just a few months ago.

Most of what I’ve said, Senator Obama has said himself. For a sampling of his own rhetoric on the issue of race, read the following excerpts from a press release sent out by NPR in advance of an interview they plan to air Wednesday with the Senator:

On feeling the need to prove himself to black leaders or civil rights leaders: “I think it’s instructive to look at how I ran my U.S. Senate campaign. When I first started that race, I was not only registering poorly in the polls because nobody knew who I was, but it was really not that much different in the African-American community. And in the end, I ended up getting 80 or 90 percent of the African-American vote, but I also won the vote. So I think that the African-American community is more sophisticated than I think the pundits sometimes give them credit for. The notion that right now I’m not dominating the black vote in the polls makes perfect sense because I have only been on the national scene for a certain number of years, and people don’t yet know what my track record is.”

On the significance of his racial identity in running for President: “You know, identity politics in this country are always going to be complicated, and African-American politics in particular is weighted with extraordinary history, often painful and tragic history. And so I think my candidacy for the presidency is going to bring to the surface a whole bunch of stuff. A lot of it won’t necessarily have to do with me, but will have to do with the country being in a dialogue about where we are now, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.”

On whether being an African American president would influence how he governs: “Well, I guess what I would say would be that there are certain instincts that I have that may be stronger because of my experience as an African American. I don’t think they’re exclusive to African Americans but I think I maybe feel them more acutely. I think I would be very interested in having a civil rights division that is serious about enforcing civil rights laws. I think that when it comes to an issue like education, for example, I feel great pain knowing that there are children in a lot of schools in American who are not getting anything close to the kind of education that will allow them to compete. And I think a lot of candidates – Republican and Democrat – feel concern about that. But when I know that a lot of those kids look just like my daughters, maybe it’s harder for me to separate myself from their reality. Every time I see those kids, they feel like a part of me.”

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog