Great... we had a front-runner with a clear path to the presidency, but race fucked it up

Kurt_and_Hunter

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Thu Mar-20-08 01:15 PM
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Great... we had a front-runner with a clear path to the presidency, but race fucked it up

Edited on Thu Mar-20-08 02:09 PM by Kurt_and_Hunter

We had a front-runner with a clear path to the presidency, but then a candidate who would do anything to win intentionally split the Party in two, destroying our chances at the White House.

The weapon? Race. It's oldest trick in the book... convince members of an ethnic group that they should not vote for the "different" one. It was not enough to just say, "vote your race." The different one had to be demonized with lies and distortions until she was seen as not merely the lesser choice, but actually EVIL.

Whoops! Did I say "she"?

African-American support for Clinton has collapsed, falling to 55% in the general election match-up. Obama, on the other hand, earns solid support from African-American voters but attracts only 36% of white voters in a match-up with McCain.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/daily_presidential_tracking_poll

Yes, we have seen the most amazing act of political party suicide since the Civil War.

We used to have a front-runner who was 65% to win the presidency and who was beloved by African-American voters. Her husband was the most popular President with African-Americans--even more than JFK--and she was roughly as popular. White people didn't like her so much, but black people loved Hillary Clinton. Black support was supposed to be her glide path to the nomination.

Then Obama entered the race, and a funny thing happened. AA voters showed a level of maturity and enlightened self-interest that put the behavior of white voters to shame. In large numbers, they declined to chose based on skin color, and instead choose on policy and trust and track record.

All polling showed that Obama was attracting a lot of white voters, and Hillary was getting the black vote. It was a hopeful circumstance. Doctor King's dream was coming to fruition.

Well, that obviously couldn't stand! God forbid we have people voting across racial lines.

So, after winning almost all-white Iowa with a post-racial message, the Obama movement fixed its sites on the AA-rich electorate of South Carolina. (Losses in NH and NV had made SC a must win.) So one of the most popular white politicians in the AA community had to be branded as a racist! Jesus H. Christ... Hillary Clinton is a good bit less racist than the average white DUer. Among white people, she and Bill are in the top tenth of the top percentile of racial enlightenment.

It's so Rovian that Rove himself might not have heard the nerve to try it. The strength must become a weakness. The races must be divided.

At the time, I posted imploring Clinton to simply skip SC, because there was no way she was going to make it out of SC without being painted as an anti-black villain. (That's politics... there was no way John Kerry was going to make it through 2004 without being painted as unpatriotic. Political lines of attack are usually pretty obvious in advance.)

All the media Clinton haters, from both right and left, piled on to the ultimate man-bites-dog story. The Clintons are bigots! It's delicious. Right-Wingers live for that stuff... remember how we didn't like Alberto Gonzales because Democrats have a problem with hispanics? We didn't like Clarence Thomas because Democrats have a problem with blacks. There is an infinite reserve of RW-leaning petulance eager to feed the "Hillary's a racist" story.

I do not want to overstate the race-based smear aspect of what has happened. A lot of African-American support flowed to Obama after Iowa because many black people were enthused by the idea that he might win. That's understandable and relatively benign. Racial pride is more than understandable, particularly among a down-trodden ethnic minority.

What I am talking about is the extra... that extra need to tear Clinton down among black voters. That little something extra that didn't just benefit Obama, but trashed Clinton, to the point where Hillary-fucking-Clinton is attracting only 55% of the AA vote in a general election poll against John (The other white meat) McCain! Yes, a guy who praised the confederate flag in 2000 and voted against the MLK holiday (I think... could be wrong about that one, but Arizona was the last state to adopt it)... but at least McCain isn't an arch white supremacist like that Hillary Clinton.

And an army of chuckle-heads throughout the blogosphere and on DU bought into ever sordid scrap of the great lie. It was easy to do. People didn't like Hillary and, demonstrating that archetypal wing-nut psychology we find so contemptible when the other side does it, were eager to transfer anger over the IWR into a willingness to believe anything... any lie, any conspiracy.

Well, congratulations. You have succeeded in severing the Party's traditional AA base, smearing the only successful President our Party has had since JFK, and demonizing people who don't vote based solely on skin color. It is sadly typical of the syndrome that you now blame the Clintons for what you have done.

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Added on Edit: This post is like ROSHOMON. My narrative here is not the only narrative, but it is valid narrative that fits the facts as well as the conventional DU narrative. I don't expect all people to see things the same way I do, but I hope that even folks who violently disagree with my characterization will recognize that it is a consistent theory of events, not mere propaganda or argument.

As with all things, there is a stark quality to argument. Nobody can deny that my narrative is as least 10% true, and I do not present it as 90% true. Anything as complex as social dynamics in a national campaign is not likely to be 100% one way or another.