"If Barack Obama were white, he'd already be the nominee."

BeyondGeography

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Thu Dec-13-07 11:00 PM
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"If Barack Obama were white, he'd already be the nominee."

Edited on Thu Dec-13-07 11:01 PM by BeyondGeography

The Beginning of the Underground Campaign
By Richard Reeves

WASHINGTON -- A well-connected friend in the Hillary Clinton campaign let this slip after a tour of early primary states: "If Barack Obama were white, he'd already be the nominee."

Whoa! So it begins.

...Then comes the long, dirty season, which will peak in the last weeks of October 2008. There will be some overlap between serious and dirty because they are both for the highest of stakes. Whispers about candidates are directly proportional to their chances for nomination or election. Obama's race, for instance, or Romney's religion only come into heavy play -- word of mouth, anonymous phone calls, unsigned leaflets -- when it looks as if they may win. When the going gets tough, the tough get dirty.

...As the race gets tougher, and closer, the questions, spoken and rarely spoken, become as fundamental as black and white. Nobody is asking anymore whether Barack is black enough. The reaction to the more than 20,000 South Carolina blacks who came out to see and hear Obama and Oprah Winfrey will sooner or later trigger nasty questions about whether he is too black -- and can we accept a black president? Do we want a woman president, particularly that Hillary woman? Is Rudy Giuliani too New York, too Italian, too married or just too sleazy? Is Romney too Mormon -- and what exactly is a Mormon? Is there room enough for both Mike Huckabee and Jesus in the White House?

...In more recent times than the Adams-Jefferson contest of 1800, polls have also played a role in the underside of American diversity. Without exception in my memory, polls have tended to show black candidates doing better than they eventually do on election days. The latest example was Harold Ford's race for the Senate in Tennessee last year. After both commercials and whispers about him, a black man, and white women, he lost a race that polls indicated he would probably win.

Have we moved past all that? Not completely, I'm sure...==

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucrr/20071214/cm_ucrr/thebeginningoftheundergroundcampaign

Comment: Richard Reeves is a mediocre columnist (and the proof here is he gets the Ford race wrong; polls taken right before the election showed him doing worse than the final result, not better) and he never explains exactly what this Clintonista is trying to say here. But the fact that the rest of his column veers into smearing as political sport tells me it wasn't positive.

As a stand-alone pronouncement, it suggests two things: The Clinton campaign knows at a very deep level it is selling the wrong product at the wrong time, and they are actively using Obama's race in discussions with the press to help them create doubt about their main challenger. Not surprising; just more sleaze from the factory.