Ever since the South Carolina primary, race has been hovering over the Democrats like Poe’s Raven, cawing "Evermore."
It has become especially an unnerving sound this past week between the results of a Quinnipiac poll indicating that Obama may have trouble attracting white votes in the fall and the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Of the MLK assassination, EJ Dionne wrote earlier this week:
From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.
I would have to argue with the estimable Mr. Dionne. As much as I personally admired Dr. King, the fate of liberalism was not sealed with his assassination. The fate of liberalism was sealed in the 1971 Supreme Court decision that allowed forced busing to achieve racial integration in the nation’s schools.
Even if it had happened within the time-frame Dionne writes about above and even though its roots are definitely within that time-frame, it’s unlikely that E.J. would have included forced busing on his roll call of liberal triumphs of the period. Forced busing was American liberalism’s great, disastrous overreach. And its bitter residue reveals itself in the fear if not the facts generated by the Quinnipiac Poll. That fear of course is that whites, and white men in particular, will ultimately not vote for a black person for president out of deep-seated racial animosity.
Having grown up in one of those East Coast ethnic enclaves that proved to be a breeding ground for so-called Reagan Democrats, I have at least as much sense of those blue collar voters as Chris Matthews claims to have--maybe more since I have yet to make my first million. Growing up around these people, I witnessed their attitudes toward the Civil Rights movement over the dinner table. At first it was something totally alien to them, as were blacks in general. When network news programs educated them to the fact that blacks in this country could not vote, they were genuinely surprised. When those same network news programs showed them pictures of blacks being humiliated and beaten for asking to be served at segregated lunch counters, my relatives were appalled. When the networks showed blacks marching with dignity in demand for basic rights, my neighbors were moved. I think it’s safe to say that my ethnic enclave took as much pride in the passage of the Civil Rights Bill as most of the nation did. A wrong righted.
But then came the bridge too far: forced busing. Suddenly the powers-that-be determined that we should right the wrong of racial segregation on the backs of children. The desires of the State trumped the most fundamental desire of parents to move into neighborhoods with good schools. The typically good liberal intentions behind the policy led to white flight for the suburbs, the abandonment of city schools to a diminished tax base, a distrust of judicial activism, and resentments running in both directions across the racial divide. The legacy is the sorry state of our urban public schools as well as the anxiety Democrats everywhere feel about Obama’s chances in the fall.
It’s important to remember this or be educated about it because it helps to understand that working class whites in America are not reflexively racist as is implied in the coverage of Obama’s electoral chances. To dismiss Reagan Democrats as racists is wrong and dangerous to the long-term renewal of liberalism in America. Reagan Democrats did not turn against their party because of black people; they turned because of policies that adversely and profoundly affected their lives.
Obama’s ability to reach those voters and bring them back to the party will have less to do with his bowling score than with his ability to assure them that liberalism’s worst excesses as manifest in such inherently un-American policies as forced busing are a thing of the past. The acknowledgment in his Philadelphia speech of the legitimate concerns of white voters indicates that he is up to that challenge.
Unfortunately at this point it looks as if it will be more difficult for bloggers on the left to see that Obama’s challenge is not to overcome racism, but the legacy of bad racial policy. Watching progressive bloggers this week contort themselves over the Quinnipiac Poll would have been funny if it weren’t all so serious. It reached its nadir with David Sirota at TPM café, who declared flatly, "There should be no doubt that racism is a powerful force in the Democratic nominating contest." Then Sirota unveiled his Race Chasm graph, which he explained thusly:
Obama is winning very white states where black-white racial politics basically doesn't exist, and states with a large enough black population to offset a racially motivated white vote. The Race Chasm - states with more than 7 percent but less than 17 percent black populations - is where Clinton has won three quarters of her states - and that's no accident. These are states where black-white racial politics very much exist, but where the black vote is not big enough to offset a racially motivated white vote. And that white vote is being motivated by the Clintons.
I don’t possess Sirota’s breathtaking certainty abut the motivations of masses of people I’ve never met, nor do I have a graph, but I do have plenty of doubt over this theory he tells me I’m not allowed to doubt. First of all, the racism, as he calls it, only vexes him where it concerns white voting patterns for Clinton. No where in his promulgation does he mention black voting patterns for Obama. If he did, he would either have to accuse blacks of racism in their voting or he would have to abandon his racism formulation. Better for him if he did the latter. Having had the good fortune for the past year to be married to a Hillary supporter and having spent Super Tuesday in a room full of friends and co-workers equally divided between Clinton and Obama, I have been able to escape the erroneous and debilitating notion that all Hillary supporters are drooling racists.
That is not to say there is not a tribal factor in their choice, as there is in many of our choices in life. I think it’s fair to say that Hillary and Barack are pretty close on policy positions so that when it comes time to make a choice between them, it would not necessarily be sexist nor racist for one to say, "Hey, I’m a woman, so I’m going with the woman." Or, even, "I’m black, so I’m going with the black guy." Short of flipping a coin, this seems like basic human nature when choices are so close.
For a certain segment in liberalism, however, what’s playing out in this election is nothing more than good old American racism...bigotry...hatred of one race for another. This segment is quick to point to James Earl Ray, Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the rise of Reagan Democrats, etc. as evidence of racism’s deathless grip on our national life. They are not as quick to see how policies--sometimes policies devised by liberals with hearts of gold--may have contributed to nothing so evil as mere changes in voting habits.
Is there a race chasm in America? You bet. A rich and poor chasm and a smart and dumb chasm, too. You don’t need no stinkin’ graphs to tell you that. Fortunately, in Obama we have a candidate who seems uniquely able and willing to bridge those chasms, rather than exploit them. In November, people of good heart and sense will see that and vote for him, regardless of race.