Divisive campaign tactics work

In yesterday's Mississippi primary, Obama beat Clinton handily, 60-37, but the story of last night in most news outlets was the vote divide along racial lines.  Obama received 90 per cent of the black vote while Clinton got 70 percent of the white vote.

Clinton's disavowal of Geraldine Ferraro's well publicized comments that Obama is benefiting from his race and basically has nothing else to offer, is pure rhetoric.  Can anyone really believe that the Clinton campaign has not worked to bring about this racial divide?  And it's working.   

Ferraro, who also threw out the accusation that criticism of Clinton has been sexist, just keeps on talking.  When asked about all these remarks she then said, "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"  That, is behind the scenes approval of what Ferraro is doing.

And that folks, is the Clinton spin.   

Comments

[Ron]

I am no fan of Ferraro and her feminist victim rhetoric, but she does raise a valid issue. This is the first time Democrats have been face with a Presidential primary where the two remaining people are a women and a mixed race candidate. Usually, many Democrats are the first ones to use the race card against the Republicans anytime there is opposition to program that benefits the African American community. Bush gets no credit from African Americans or liberal Democrats for naming Powell and Rice to some of the highes postions. Even if they disagreed with their policy positions, you would have thought they would have given Bush some credit for breaking the race barrier.
The voting exit polls show that whites over 65 voters are not voting for Obama in vast numbers. Remember these are Democratic voters not Republican voters.
In Illinois Hillary did much better outside of Chicago and the collar counties. She beat Obama in many counties. In Madison county the vote difference was about 5%. Much less than other parts of the state. This is the same voting pattern that emerged in Obama's Senatorial primary race.
Are the Clinton's faning the flames? Or is this underlying bigotry been there among Democrats for years and now exposed because of the circumstances?
Ferraro may have clumsely made her comment, but she does raise an issue the Democrats don't want to talk about, unless it is about Republicans.
Ferraro is correct in stating the racist comments get a pass many times, when made by African Americans. Remember Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton's comments in the past.
The Democrats and the Clintons never in the wildest dreams thought it would get this far. They thought Obama would make a good run, lift the spirits of the African American voters, and then use this in the fall to their advantage against the Repulicans. They deserve the mess they have created for themselves.

[Ron]

The Obama-Clinton-McCain Paradoxes [Victor Davis Hanson]

Part of the problem with discussing race, Obama’s middle name, his wife’s astounding proclamations, and all the rest is perhaps remembering that there are two different constituencies, his base and the country, that require an Obama two-step.

No doubt having a middle name like Hussein was ‘cool’ at Columbia and Harvard where it might solidify one’s ethnic or exotic fides. By the same token, a well-paid, Ivy-League-educated African-American woman like Michelle Obama, of course, had considerable success in lecturing upscale elite liberal audiences on their sloth, or cynicism, or why one should not heretofore have pride in the United States, or why America was a mean place. And a bumper-sticker African-American identify was advantageous in the Ivy League for Obama, and essential for success in local districted Chicago politics.

But once one slowly metamorphosizes from a state politician to a liberal Illinois Senator to the purported Democratic nominee, then all of those self-embraced identities that deliberately emphasize, rather than play down, race and culture can become polarizing to a wider constituency — and must be as muffled by the candidate as they are emphasized by his opportunistic opponents.

So now we are in this silly situation, in which at one time Obama was happy enough to remind some that his middle name was Hussein and now it is a slur for other less well-intentioned to do so; in which his wife’s browbeating of America was salve to guilty liberals and now it is considered illiberal to question her assumptions; in which a candidate who rose to prominence as a “black” candidate and garners majority margins of 90% among African-American against a very liberal female opponent insists that he has transcended race and to suggest otherwise is, well, racist.

Nothing is new in all this: all candidates expand beyond their base and try to play down their former zealotry, on issues as diverse as abortion to guns to gay rights. But what is unique is that the usual flak that meets a politician’s readjustments and opportunism in the case of Obama is additionally questioned as being racist or at least insensitive.

A final irony is that Clinton, Inc. made careers on playing up America’s supposed unfairness and insensitivity to a variety of aggrieved groups, and Hillary, as a powerful professional woman par excellence, was prepared to ride that victim horse all the way to the Presidency. But suddenly her offer to Obama of the VP spot is seen as racial condescension, the white girl in the commercial when the 3 AM phone call comes is said to be subtly racist, exegesis about who got Civil Rights legislation enacted is derided as inappropriate, and on and on. In short, the Clintons have been completely Clintonized, and when they turn to the media for their accustomed help, as in the past against the Right Wing Attack Machine — they learn it has become a Left-Wing Attack machine and directed at them!

McCain may become a proper antidote for all this. Unlike the verbose Michelle Obama, he really has suffered in his life; unlike Barack Obama he really has reached across the aisle and paid a price for it; and unlike Obama's promises of transparency, he really does talk in specifics and bluntly rather than in mellifluous platitudes. And as for an against-the-odds candicacy, in postmodern America a 71-year-old survivor of communist torture and malignant melonoma seems to match the narrative of a young Ivy-League graduate of mixed ancestry.