My column on race and the race has elicited a surprising number of responses. As I detailed in a post last week, the anti-Obama crowd has offered an interesting array of reasons for opposing the Illinois Senator — many of them legitimate — but the arguments tend to be marred by what I will call the “they do it, too” excuse.
I received a letter — yes, an actual letter — from a poet and teacher that I know, a political conservative who was disappointed and offended by my Dispatches column.
He identifies some reasons for his dislike and distrust of the Senator, including his ideology, “his cocksure demeanor” and his connections to his supporters. He calls him “an arrogant, narcissistic, professionally undistinguished (i.e, for POTUS), crypto-Marxist demagogue.”
This is harsh stuff that reads right out of the conservative playbook on how to attack Democrats over the years. But what makes it remarkable is his focus on what the black community thinks of McCain (only one in 20 blacks have a favorable opinion, he says), despite his resume — a fact worth discussing, but one used here to race the specter of black racism.
“That is racist; outrageous and racist, both,” he writes. “If only 5 percent of whites said they had a favorable opinion of Obama, not only would I buy your argument: I’d be shocked, embarrassed and angry, too.”
The 5 percent number is accurate, though misleading, implying as it does that 95 percent view McCain unfavorably. The poll, however, actually finds that 57 percent of blacks view him negatively — a decent majority but not damning.
Is it racism? Some of it may be. But it also is likely connected to anger over general Republican policies on race, affirmative action and poverty, the missteps of the McCain campaign and his willingness to pander during the last several years to the worst of the Republican coalition.
Black racism, however, does not address the issues I raise in the column. There remains a segment of the population — a significant segment — that will view Obama through the prism of race, which shades the way his personal attributes are seen.
Charles Blow deconstructed this argument on the op-ed page of Saturday’s issue of The New York Times, saying it is a vestige of the “murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure.”
If the percentage of white voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for a black candidate were only 15 percent, that would be more than all black voters combined. (Coincidentally, it also would be more than all voters under 24 years old.) That amounts to a racial advantage for John McCain.
And this sentiment stretched across ideological lines. Just as many white independents as Republicans said that most of the people they knew would not vote for a black candidate, and white Democrats were not far behind. Also, remember that during the Democratic primaries, up to 20 percent of white voters in some states said that the race of the candidate was important to them. Few of those people voted for the black guy.
Some might say that turnabout is fair play, citing the fact that 89 percent of blacks say they plan to vote for Obama. That level of support represents a racial advantage for him, too, right? Not necessarily. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic in the general election anyway. According to CNN exit polls John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote in 2004.
Race is a central element in this year’s campaign, even if we are talking about race in code. Arrogance can be translated as “uppity,” while experience — of which Obama has more than the current occupant of the White House, more than Ronald Reagan and at least as much as Jack Kennedy — allows the discussion to avoid saying what the right wing longs to say but can’t in polite company: Obama should know his place.
So, yes, race will be one of several determining factors this year — a sad fact of life in the United States 54 years after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of schools and 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Hank Kalet 