How Kentucky, West Virginia and Racism Could Screw Up the Clinton Exit
by DHinMI
Sat Apr 26, 2008 at 11:42:49 AM PDT
From journalist Elizabeth Drew:
At first, a large number of superdelegates planned to announce their support for Obama following Super Tuesday, but he didn’t do well enough to warrant that; then it was to be after Ohio and Texas; then after Pennsylvania; and some Democrats suggest that if Obama wins both Indiana and North Carolina a number of superdelegates will announce for him then...
"We may have to go to June, and whoever ends up with the most delegates wins," a key Democrat says. "Meanwhile, the attention will be on the battle she can’t win, so why is she doing this – from here on out she’s only bleeding the party. The right way to put it is, ‘This is a war of attrition and it’s obvious that the numbers aren’t going to add up, so what’s the point?’" He added, "The hope is that at some point the superdelegates will get frustrated and join the Obama bandwagon."
Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Howard Dean are talking about sending a letter to superdelegates urging them to go public with their endorsements. Rahm Emanuel is talking about the end game. And despite winning Pennsylvania, Clinton probably needs close to 70% of the remaining superdelegates to get the nomination, while Obama will probably need little more than 30% to put him over the top. Obama is polling well ahead of Clinton in North Carolina, and his odds of winning Indiana appear pretty good.
Just about everything points to Obama locking up enough pledged and superdelegates in the next few weeks to secure the nomination. But Kentucky and West Virginia could cause him some problems.
Way back in February, the day of the Potomac Primary, I wrote that what happened in the mountains of Virginia and Maryland could presage what would happen in the Appalachian parts of other states. Clinton pulled up to 90% in some of those counties, and she's won the Appalachian regions of every state contested.
In the 1960's, one out of three people in Appalachia 
lived poverty, per capita income was 23% lower than the national average, and the region was rapidly losing population. In 1963 the Appalachian Regional Commission was created by Congress and President Kennedy to address the problems in the area highlighted in the map. Since the 1960's counties near Atlanta, Huntsville AL and Pittsburgh have become wealthier much more developed. But much of the region remains well below national standards in most measures of economic and social well-being.
The region also has given Barack Obama by far his lowest share of the vote; this map by Kossack Meng Bomin shows that outside of Arkansas that Clinton's biggest wins (depicted in red, vs the Green Obama counties) have almost all been in Appalachia:
Why?
George Packer offers some evidence that in Appalachia it's racism:
On Wednesday, I was in Inez, Kentucky, the Appalachian town where L.B.J. declared war on poverty forty-four years ago this month. John McCain was on a tour of "forgotten places"...After [McCain's] speech, I left the county courthouse and crossed the main street to talk to a small group of demonstrators holding signs next to McCain’s campaign bus. J. K. Patrick, a retired state employee from a neighboring county, wore a button on his shirt that said "Hillary: Smart Choice."
"East of Lexington she’ll carry seventy per cent of the primary vote," he said. Kentucky votes on May 20. "She could win the general election in Kentucky." I asked about Obama. "Obama couldn’t win."
Why not?
"Race," Patrick said matter-of-factly. "I’ve talked to people—a woman who was chair of county elections last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for a black man." Patrick said he wouldn’t vote for Obama either.
Why not?
"Race. I really don’t want an African-American as President. Race."
What about race?"I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did." He meant that it went Republican. "Now what caused that? Race. There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people. They know what happened in the sixties. Under thirty—they don’t remember. I do. I was here."
Everyone knows that race is a factor in Obama’s low vote among older whites, though reporters say that no one will admit it personally. In Eastern Kentucky, people (and not just J. K. Patrick) admit it personally, without hesitation or apology. It’s impossible to say how much this has affected the primary or will affect the fall election. For voters like those I met in Inez, the objection to Obama has nothing to do with Reverend Jeremiah Wright or, God knows, Bill Ayers. There’s nothing Obama can do about it. He can’t even mention it.
Many pundits have declared that Obama has a "race problem," or a "working class problem," or more specifically a "white working class" problem. Meng Bomin's map doesn't suggest a racial problem; Obama has done extremely well in many parts of the country that are almost entirely white, including several places with primaries instead of caucuses. According to Obama campaign manager David Plouffe:
I think if you look at -- we have won white voters, particularly white voters under 60, in a lot of states. We've won white men voters in most of the states we've competed in, and, you know, again, if you look at our favorable/unfavorable ratings and the characteristics and the traits with some of these voters that have voted for Senator Clinton in recent primaries, you know they are strong and they are going to be supportive of us in the fall.
Most of the white voters voting for Hillary Clinton will enthusiastically vote for him in the fall. A good chunk of the Clinton vote is women, and there's little to suggest that they would shift from her to McCain instead of voting for the Democratic candidate, as women have been doing for decades. No, Obama doesn't have a racial problem.
It appears that Appalachia has an Obama problem.
If doing well in Appalachia—which has only about 18-20 million of the almost 300 million people who live in America—were necessary for an Obama win, he would be in deep trouble. But there aren't enough people in Appalachia to present a big problem, especially since the region makes up a relatively small part of the population of most of the states it touches. (The Appalachian counties of Pennsylvania are a bit different than the rest of the region, as they are much more Catholic than the rest of Appalachia and more ethnically diverse, with a decent number of Italians, Slavs and Germans mixed in with the most Scots-Irish and descendants of the 18th century immigrants from the English backcountry that dominate the rest of Appalachia. Those counties, in fact, are the only part of Appalachia where Obama did OK, and actually improved on his performance over similar counties in Ohio).
The two big exceptions, however, the two states in which Appalachia dominates, are Kentucky and West Virginia.
Based on the results of the primaries up to now, and for reasons suggested by Packer's interviews, we can see that Obama will not do well in West Virginia or Kentucky. And that's a problem for perceptions, because even if Obama wins North Carolina and Indiana, Clinton and her surrogates are likely to trumpet the West Virginia and Kentucky results as proof that Obama can't win white voters, and offer the results as a rationale for her to stay in the race.
If the discussion were limited to Appalachia, Clinton might have a point about the importance of her relative strength with white voters. But increasingly, in presidential elections, Democrats can't win Kentucky, and West Virginia is also trending strongly Republican. In 1992 Bill Clinton won Kentucky by 3 points, but against Bob Dole he barely hung on for a win of less than one point. Despite winning the popular vote, Al Gore—from neighboring Tennessee—lost Kentucky by 15 points, and Kerry lost it by 20. Frankly, Kentucky is not part of a map that shows a narrow Democratic win. If any Democrat were to win Kentucky, it would be part of a landslide win.
Even West Virginia, once one of the most Democratic states in the country—it voted for Dukakis and was one of the six states won by Jimmy Carter in 1980—is now moving in to Republican territory for Presidential years. It's not as Republican as Kentucky, but like Kentucky it's unlikely to go Democratic regardless of the Democratic nominee, even if it were Clinton.
The press, however, will lap up the talking points of the pundits, Clinton spinners (and Republicans) that losing Kentucky and West Virginia means that Obama won't do well with White voters, when it really means voters in Appalachia aren't ready to vote for a Black candidate, even though in most of the rest of the country they are.
I disagree, obviously, with Packer's conclusion that Obama's race is a serious political problem; I think it's only a serious problem if he needed majorities in Appalachia or he was trying to appeal to streadfast Republicans who vote Republican for, among other reasons, racism. Nevertheless, his advice is still sound:
McCain began his speech in Inez by saying, "I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and, after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours." His modest disclaimer seemed unnecessary—the local pol who introduced McCain had just finished calling him a son of Kentucky at heart, and the crowd was entirely on his side. But for Obama, who’s bound to strike people in places even less isolated than Inez as alien, this kind of self-presentation might be essential. Rather than analyzing them out loud, or pretending to be one of them, he should speak about the differences (and race is far from the only one) directly, candidly, in the blunt, personal language that made his Philadelphia speech so memorable. He should say that in spite of these differences, in spite of what he doesn’t know about or share in their life, he knows what Presidential leadership can do to improve their lives—as did Roosevelt, who was an aristocrat, and Kennedy, who was rich and Catholic.
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