This was posted to a mostly conservative audience at The Crossed Pond, so it's without some of its context.
But it's spurred by a reader email debate going on at Andrew Sullivan's (I know, I know), specifically this one. And, more generally, by something I hear a lot, either privately or on progressive boards and sites. The sentiment amounts to "I want to like Obama, but I just don't think a black candidate can win" or "I like Obama, but America's not ready for a black candidate" or "I just think there's too many people out there who won't vote for a black candidate no matter what", or some variant. I'm not talking about any other qualms about Obama, just honing in on this one.
I post it here because I think it's worth thinking about, particularly if you find yourself saying that.
I don’t understand at all the suggestion that Barack can’t win because he’s black.
I think largely it’s a function of this liberal notion that the majority of the country are all evangelical racist rednecks, which is just as stupid as the conservative notion that the majority of the country are Christian-hating urban New Agers.
I DO buy that there is a swath of the population that won’t vote for a black guy no matter what.
What your reader, however, in suggesting that, is missing, is that that swath of the population are not "swing" voters. That’s their suggestion, isn’t it? That there are a bunch of racist Republican assholes that won’t vote for a black person no matter what, but that somehow Hillary Clinton can bring them into the fold?
Do they realize how stupid that sounds?
Let me break it to them straight: the type of voter that won’t vote for a black guy no matter what is not a voter that the Democratic party is normally going to win. This is not a "swing" block.
Look, there’s a liberal conception that about half of the country are all beer-swilling racist rednecks, which first of all, as your other reader points out, isn’t true. But even if it were, Hillary Clinton is not the candidate who is going to bring these people into the fold. I readily accept that somewhere between 15-25% of the voting public might not vote for a black guy for President. However, we’re not talking about some vast swing block when we say that. We’re talking about pretty reliable Republican voters that aren’t going to vote for a Democrat PERIOD. So who cares what justification they use to cast the anti-Democrat vote that they’re sure to cast anyway?
And the nebulous idea that there is an abstract hoard of otherwise undecided voters who are also screamingly racist is pretty opaque, and runs up against the very real and very concrete 35-45% of voters who won’t vote SPECIFICALLY for Hillary, period. And those people probably skew a lot more undecided generally than do the redneck racists. I’m not quite clear on why that’s not an electability issue, but Barack being black is.
So your reader’s case is we should apparently ignore the great swath of mainstream undecideds who won’t vote for Hillary under any circumstances, and instead we should be basing our electability decisions on the relative minority of racists well within the Republican fold already?
Does anybody but me see some kind of crazy miscalculation inherent to that?
And finally, let me say this. There are two types of racism. There’s the overt, hanging-nooses-in-trees, confederate flag type. And then there’s the soft type, which is just as often liberal as conservative.
I spend a lot of time in rural red America. I have yet to hear a single person say that they won’t vote for Obama because he’s black.
I also spend a lot of time in urban blue America. And I’ve heard an awful lot of people say they won’t vote for Obama because he’s black. Their reason is "America isn’t ready for a black president".
But who cares what their reason is?
The ultimate truth is if Obama gets sunk because of his race, it won’t be because of beer-swilling rednecks.
It’ll be because members of the Democratic base don’t think being black is "electable" enough.
Now which is the real kind of racism sure to hold our country back?