I was wondering when someone would finally ask the question that none of the talking heads on TV have had the testicular fortitude to delve into with Hillary Rodham Clinton: Why can't she win over black voters?
I'll confess that all of the talk about "working class white voters" and why Barack Obama can't get them, pisses me off. Why? Because at bare minimum it's unbalanced reporting considering that now, HRC can't pull a black vote let alone operate a coffee machine properly.
But Thomas Schaller of Salon finally poses the question and explains why in a well written, analytical piece. Thomas Schaller In it, he examines the foul-ups, bleeps and blunders of this candidate who once had a comfortable lead among the black electorate. lead
A couple of those notable arguments:
In quick succession, three things happened in the month and a half between Thanksgiving and the New Hampshire primary. First, Oprah's unprecedented mid-December endorsement of Obama sent a clear signal to her mixed-race female-dominated audience that they should feel as comfortable having Obama on their living room television screens for the nightly newscast as they do having her there during late-afternoon coffee talk. Next, in January, white Iowans sent a safe-harbor signal to black Americans wary about the Democratic Party nominating a black candidate that it was OK to get behind Obama. Hillary Clinton had no control over either of those developments, of course. And a top Obama advisor confirmed to me that the campaign was already tracking movement by black voters toward Obama by Thanksgiving.
Yes, you gotta love Oprah's seal of approval. If she can sell a book, why can't she sell a candidate? As for the Iowans, my jokes about country folk and how "backwards" I perceived them to be stopped that day. They gave me hope that dear god, this country can indeed change. That is a strong admission for an African-American such as myself who has benefited from the opportunities in this country, yet still maintained a healthy dose of skepticism.
But Schaller's piece isn't just about those two things. He lays much of the blame at HRC's feet - along with her husband's - which is right where it belongs:
But Clinton did have (or should have had) control over the third factor: the behavior of her campaign and of Bill Clinton from that point forward. Yet, through a series of intended or unintended developments -- from Bill's "fairy tale" and "false premise" comments concerning Obama's stance on the Iraq war, to hints of black-brown animosities between African-American and Hispanic Democrats, to Hillary's incessant "not qualified to lead" insinuations about Obama -- the Clinton campaign signaled that if they were going to lose the black vote, they might as well turn it into an advantage with other elements in the Democratic coalition, notably white working-class voters.
Ahhh yes, turning the party on itself and dividing and conquering. The Clintons wouldn't do that, now would they? I know that I've seen a lot of chimpanzee cookies flung in this race, and many of them didn't come from Obama until he absolutely felt the need to defend himself. Yup, folks, HRC screwed up. Big time. What did it cost her, Don Pardo?!?! It very well may cost her POTUS because had she not written off the black vote. This may have happened:
What might the situation look like now if Clinton had managed to keep Obama's 90 percent black support just to 80 percent? It's impossible to know for certain, because it depends on where specifically -- in which states and districts -- she garnered those extra black votes. But NBC News political director and delegate math expert Chuck Todd ventured a conservative, back-of-the-napkin estimate. "I'm not sure how many more delegates she would have gotten at 20 percent performance, but I'd guess roughly 25 to 30," Todd told me. "That may not seem like a lot, but it would have swung the net delegate margin by 50 to 60, or about a third of his current pledged delegate lead."
I will confess and my evidence is anecdotal at best, but the big problem in the black community, at least among the working class blacks that I call friends and family, is that they couldn't consider voting for Obama because they were afraid that "they" were going to take him. They is a big force in our lives because they took Jack. They took Bobby. And they took Martin. Anytime there's a sign of change and the remotest opportunity for racial reconciliation, they take them away.
I say not this time. I have wavered about what I'll do if Obama isn't the nominee come August (or sooner), but I don't think I will have to make that decision.
Once again: Schaller gets it:
The black vote was to Obama what small-state white voters in the Electoral College were to George W. Bush in 2000 -- namely, a concentrated bloc of voters whose power magnified their preferred candidate's electoral support beyond their absolute numerical value. For African-Americans, this should come as a pleasant irony, given the controversies about the counting of their votes in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio four years later.
I don't think the black vote is monolithic because of identity politics, but I do have to guess that many African-Americans are internally humming We Have Overcome should Obama do the unbelievable. For the first time that I can remember in my nearly 43 years, a vast majority of African Americans - young, old, working class, middle class, poor - passionately support a common cause.
We see a light and although HRC has her support in the community in the person of Maya Angelou, a woman I had the pleasure to meet once, we've been able to respect her decision and go on. But even as Ms. Angelou supports Clinton in Indiana in televison ads, it may be too little too late. Schaller knows this:
The problem for Clinton is that too few other African-Americans, male or female, have reached this same finding. In her inimitable meter, Angelou proclaims in the ad that she "watched [Clinton] become interested in public health and in education for all the children -- and I watched her stand." But Clinton failed to stand for African-American Democrats when the chance presented itself late last fall and into early January, even if doing so meant firing key staffers or dressing down her own husband. Doing that might have denied Barack Obama the near-universal claim to their support he now enjoys, and the black-white coalition he built from it. For Hillary Clinton, the price of that failure may turn out to be nothing less than the nomination itself.