Obama's Working-Class Backlash: Race Is Not the Problem

Stuart Taylor Jr.'s got the hot essay of the day on Obama's vulnerabilities with the white working-class vote:

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.

See also, Michael Gerson, "Sticking Points for Obama."