Is Barack Obama–now closer than ever to winning the Democratic nomination–nonetheless at a political disadvantage because of white racism, or "racial fears," or "race-baiting," or racial "double standards," as some commentators have suggested?
The evidence indicates otherwise, as it pertains both to this election and more broadly to the perennial tendency of many in the racial-grievance groups, the media, and academia to exaggerate how much white racism remains and its impact on African-Americans.
But many of the voters who have been unfairly tarred as racist do have a different flaw that Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain are working especially hard to exploit: ignorance of elementary economics and other things every high school graduate should know, which accounts for the low quality of the debate on issues ranging from the gas tax to trade to the budget.
More on voter ignorance later. First, let’s examine the notion that white racism, or efforts to fan it, underlie Obama’s recent difficulties in winning over middle-class white voters.
"It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this nation’s history," The New York Times declared in an April 30 editorial, that Obama was so widely called upon to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while the media have given much less attention to McCain’s courtship of an equally bigoted white, far-right Texas pastor named John Hagee. The editorial pre-emptively condemned as "race-baiting" any campaign ads showing Wright in action. Times columnist Frank Rich and PBS commentator Bill Moyers voiced similar complaints. And Steve Kornacki wrote in the April 29 New York Observer that Wright was being and will be "used to stoke racial fears and prejudices about Mr. Obama."
All of this seems unpersuasive to me. True, the McCain-Hagee connection deserves more attention, which it will no doubt get once the spotlight moves past the Clinton-Obama donnybrook. But McCain did not spend 20 years as a parishioner in and contributor to Hagee’s church, was not married by Hagee, did not ask Hagee to baptize his children, did not draw on a Hagee sermon for the title to his book, and did not palliate Hagee’s bigotry by suggesting that his own grandmother was a bigot, too.
Wright aside, if Obama’s race were a net liability with voters, he would have had no chance of winning the nomination–not with a campaign more focused on his personal appeal than on ideas and issues, and a political resume thinner than that of any presidential nominee in more than a century.
It’s clear from the election returns and polls that a majority of Democrats–especially but not exclusively black Democrats–see Obama’s race as a plus, not a minus. The same is true of the many independents (including me) and even Republicans who think that electing a black president would (other things being equal) promote racial healing. And those Republicans who hold Obama’s race against him "are probably firmly in John McCain’s camp already," as Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told National Journal‘s Linda Douglass.
There is plenty of residual racism, of course. But race-motivated white votes against Obama have been more than offset by race-motivated black votes for Obama, who won more than 90 percent of the black vote in both Indiana and North Carolina on Tuesday.
Some commentators discern signs of white racism in exit polls showing (for example) that 16 percent of Indiana respondents said that a candidate’s race was an important factor for them, with whites in this category voting heavily for Clinton. But 83 percent said that race was not important. And Clinton’s majorities among whites seem attributable less to racism than to understandable concerns about Obama’s belatedly severed connection to Wright, which nearly half of voters in both Indiana and North Carolina identified as an important issue.
The best evidence that the Wright factor hurt Obama far more than his own blackness is that before the turbulent pastor became famous, Obama easily won the caucuses in overwhelmingly white Iowa on January 3 and, over the next seven weeks, captured the white male vote in Maryland, Virginia, and Wisconsin and as many white male voters as Clinton did in South Carolina. Although Obama did less well among white women, the obvious reason was Clinton’s gender, not Obama’s race.
Obama’s difficulty in winning middle-class white votes has mostly postdated the heavy publicity about Wright. Barry Szczesny, a lifelong Republican from Michigan, for example, told The Washington Post that he switched parties earlier this year to vote for Obama but had been "getting a little weak-kneed" recently because the Wright connection had cast doubt on Obama’s ability to unify the country.
Some commentators also make much of the pattern whereby black candidates have at times done much worse on Election Day than pollsters had predicted. The theory is that covertly racist whites lied to pollsters and then voted against the black candidates. But it seems at least as likely that some voters who had leaned against the black candidate all along, for reasons unrelated to race, had given the answers they thought would meet with the poll takers’ approval.
More broadly, notwithstanding our racist history and its tragic legacy, with many blacks stuck on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, the white racism that remains today may do less damage to African-Americans than do black leaders such as Wright. They spread the false and debilitating message that blacks can’t get a fair shake in America no matter how hard they study and work.
To the contrary, "America, while still flawed in its race relations, … is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; [and] offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa." So said prominent Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, an African-American, in 1991. Obama’s astonishing electoral success helps prove Patterson’s point.
It’s telling that politicians as successful as Clinton and McCain see gas-tax demagogy as a political winner.
The voter ignorance that Clinton and McCain have tried so hard to exploit may present a greater obstacle than racism does to the coolly cerebral Obama, who seems to have more distaste than most politicians for the kind of pandering in which all must engage. The appallingly dumb proposals by Clinton and McCain to suspend the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax this summer are a leading example.
This "pandering and ignorance-across-party-lines … should make Americans hold their heads in their hands and moan," as James Fallows put it on Atlantic.com. "No one who has thought about this issue thinks that it will actually reduce prices or–more important–help the people disproportionately hurt by $100+/barrel oil and $4 gasoline. And to the extent it has any effect on America’s long-term approach to energy policy, transportation, oil dependence, and climate change, the effect will be perverse."
A Clinton TV ad proclaimed, "Hillary wants the oil companies to pay for the gas tax this summer so that you don’t have to" and implied that this would save consumers $8 billion. In fact, "research shows that waiving the gas tax would generate major profits for oil companies rather than significantly lowering prices for consumers," more than 230 economists explained in a joint statement.
Obama commendably rejected the proposed gas-tax holiday as "a classic Washington gimmick." For this, Clinton tried to caricature him as an elitist unconcerned about the travails of ordinary voters.
Clinton’s gas-tax gambit was so conspicuously shameless–and so consistent with polls showing that fewer than half of respondents see her as "honest and trustworthy"–that it may not have won her many votes. But it’s telling that politicians as successful as Clinton and McCain see gas-tax demagogy as a political winner. And on many other issues, Obama has been able to remain competitive only by joining other candidates in pandering to voter ignorance and narrow, short-term self-interest.
Examples include chasing Farm Belt votes by supporting subsidies for turning corn into ethanol, which does far more to aggravate the critical world food shortage than to alleviate our energy problems; blaming economic distress on NAFTA and other trade agreements, despite strong evidence that freer trade helps more working Americans than it hurts; and proposing massive tax cuts and spending increases at a time of soaring budget deficits and the looming fiscal disaster presented by the unfunded Medicare and Social Security entitlements of aging Baby Boomers.
The "values of our parents’ generation–work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means–have given way to subprime values," New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. "We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people." Amen. But do the people want to hear the truth?
This article appeared in the Saturday, May 10, 2008 edition of National Journal.