We shared dinner last night with a neighbor who is a Clinton supporter. As news of Obama's South Carolina win came in, the conversation went something like this:
Me (happily) : Obama has won South Carolina with 54% of the vote.
Neighbor (unconvincingly): That's the worst thing that could have happened to his campaign.
Me: Why do you say that? He needed a win.
Neighbor: But he'll win because of the black vote, which will cause him to become more identified as the "black" candidate for President.
Me: The Democratic Party electorate in South Carolina is majority black, so even if Clinton had won it would also be because of the black vote.
Neighbor: Yeah, but I'm looking ahead to the general election. There are a lot of people--more than you realize--who won't vote for a black man, especially if he appears to be the candidate of black America.
Me: And how many of those people would be likely to vote for a Democrat anyway?
Neighbor: All I'm saying is race is going to be a big issue in this campaign if Obama is the nominee, particularly if he gets the nomination because of huge black support. No one wants to talk about it, no one will say this to a pollster, but that attitude is there and it's more common than you think.
Me: I'm just so sick of this campaign being reported on in terms of race and gender.
Neighbor: I am too, but that's a reality now and it's not going to go away.
Well, OK, I paraphrased this exchanged a little bit to make us sound more articulate than we really were, particularly after a round of Susan's famed chocolate martinis. At it's root, it was another one of those arguments about which is more important in a political contest: facts or perceptions.
This morning, the facts came in. Obama did indeed win the black vote by a large margin--78%--but also took a quarter of the white vote. What jumps out at me is the statistic that 63% of people who had never voted before chose Obama. Turnout was high; Obama himself got more votes than were cast in the entire South Carolina Democratic primary in 2004. This suggests that Obama is actually doing what other politicians have only talked about doing: he is inspiring people who have not been engaged in politics to come out on election day. That, I think, will more than make up for the loss of those voters who would vote Democratic only if the nominee was white.
What is most interesting to me about all of this is the attempt by Obama, but more so (in the interesting factor) by the media, to describe Obama as a post-race candidate -- which he could have been. Of course, by trying to discuss him as a post-race candidate, the media usually spends their time talking about him in terms of his race. And (ignoring the claims that Clinton[s] is injecting race into the campaign, which I'm not sure yet is as accurate as many want it to seem) the media is having it both ways as they try to turn Obama into a post-race candidate but alse spent the majority of the time between New Hampshire and South Carolina talking about nothing but race, Obama and the election.
If Obama becomes the "black candidate", the media has to take the blame. Just as they will have to take the blame if Clinton becomes more of the "female candidate" after every news station aired the infamous cry a hundred times a day for something like a week.
Posted by: Anthony Frame | January 30, 2008 at 03:20 PM