By Matthew MoskWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, June 28, 2008; C01
PRINCETON, N.J.
The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."
Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective -- and baseless -- Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year.
During that time, polls show the number of voters who mistakenly believe Obama is a Muslim rose -- from 8 percent to 13 percent between November 2007 and March 2008. And some cited this religious mis-affiliation when explaining their primary votes against him.
As the general-election campaign against Sen. John McCain has gotten underway, Obama's aides have made the smears a top target. They recently launched FightTheSmears.com to "aggressively push back with the truth," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, and go viral with it. The Web site urges supporters to upload their address books and send e-mails to all of their friends. "
But long before this, Allen had been obsessing about the origins of her e-mail at the institute, which is most famous for having been the research home of Albert Einstein. Allen studies the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn. She was familiar, of course, with the false rumors of a secret love child that helped sink McCain's White House bid in 2000, and the Swift boat attacks that did the same to Democrat John Kerry in 2004. But the Obama e-mail was on another plane: The use of the Internet made it possible to launch anonymous attacks that could reach millions of voters in weeks or even days.
As an Obama supporter -- she had met the senator while she worked as a dean at the University of Chicago -- it made her angry. And curious.
"I started thinking, 'How does one stop it?' "
Allen set her sights on dissecting the modern version of a whisper campaign, even though experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin. Along the way, even as her hunt grew cold, she gained valuable insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age.
How Rumors Are Born
Allen was ideally suited to embark on such a difficult hunt. She boasts two doctorates, one in classics from Cambridge University and the other in government from Harvard University, and won a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" award at the age of 29. Last year she joined the faculty of the institute, the only African American and one of a handful of women at the elite research center, where she works alongside groundbreaking physicists, mathematicians and social scientists. They don't have to teach, and they face no quotas on what they publish. Their only mandate is to work in the tradition of Einstein, wrestling with the most vexing problems in the universe.
While Allen was already an expert on the mechanics of politics, she fast began to learn the mechanics of the Internet. She discovered, for instance, that the recipe for launching a chain e-mail attack is not as simple as typing it up and hitting the send button to a long list of recipients. It takes effort to seed a chain mail that spreads as widely as the Obama missive, explained Jeff Bedser, president of the Internet Crimes Group, a company that helps corporations battle such broadsides. "Lighting that fire, getting something to have momentum, takes work," he said.
For this kind of chain-mail message to gain traction, it must be plausible, and it has to resonate, said Eric Dezenhall, a public relations specialist who once worked in the Reagan White House. Obama was vulnerable, Dezenhall said, because of his unusual name, his childhood in Indonesia, a foreign-born father, and his sudden arrival on the national stage without a fully fleshed-out biography. "All of these things gave it merchandising legs," Dezenhall said.
As Allen scrolled through the e-mail about Obama, she saw that the list of people who had received the missive consumed several full screens. Her first thought was to try to learn about the people behind the addresses. She traced a number to North Carolina Web sites about golf, but quickly hit a dead end. Then she had another thought: What if she took some of the unusual phrases from the text of the e-mail and Googled them?
Her eyes fell on this untrue sentence: "ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Kuran (Their equivalency to our Bible, but very different beliefs)."
The use of "their equivalency" and the spelling of "Kuran" instead of "Koran" made the sentence her point of departure.
That search showed that the first mention of the e-mail on the Internet had come more than a year earlier. A participant on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com posted a copy of the e-mail on Jan. 8, 2007, and added this line at the end: "Don't know who the original author is, but this email should be sent out to family and friends."
Allen discovered that theories about Obama's religious background had circulated for many years on the Internet. And that the man who takes credit for posting the first article to assert that the Illinois senator was a Muslim is Andy Martin.
Martin, a former political opponent of Obama's, is the publisher of an Internet newspaper who sends e-mails to his mailing list almost daily. He said in an interview that he first began questioning Obama's religious background after hearing his famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In an Aug. 10, 2004, article, which he posted on Web sites and e-mailed to bloggers, he said that Obama had concealed his Muslim heritage. "I feel sad having to expose Barack Obama," Martin wrote in an accompanying press release, "but the man is a complete fraud. The truth is going to surprise, and disappoint, and outrage many people who were drawn to him. He has lied to the American people, and he has sought to misrepresent his own heritage." Martin's article did not suggest an association between Obama and radical Islam.
Martin was trying to launch a Senate bid against Obama when he says he first ran the Democrat's name by a contact in London. "They said he must be a Muslim. That was interesting to me because it was an angle that nobody had covered. We started looking. As a candidate you learn how to harness the Internet. You end up really learning how to work the street. I sort of picked this story up as a sideline." Martin said the primary basis for his belief was simple -- Obama's father was a Muslim. In a defamation lawsuit he filed against the New York Times and others several months ago, Martin says that Obama "eventually became a Christian" but that "as a matter of Islamic law began life as a Muslim" due to his father's religion.
The belief that Obama unavoidably inherited his religion was not uniquely Martin's -- as recently as May, it was proffered by Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, in a New York Times op-ed piece.
(After the Times was deluged with complaints, the paper's public editor, or ombudsman, later wrote that he had interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them disagreed with Luttwak's interpretation of Islamic law.)
Martin said he posted his 2004 article on Web sites, and distributed it by e-mail to authors of other popular blogs. But he said he had nothing to do with the chain e-mail that got Allen's attention. "I'm not trying to smear anybody," Martin said. "I just felt that was an underreported story."
But Martin said he understands how his initial article has taken on a life of its own. "There's nothing sinister here. I was thinking of running for Senate and was looking for a story to put some sizzle on the plate."
Other articles followed Martin's. Andrew Walden, the founder of an alternative Hawaiian newspaper with the motto "The untold story, the unspoken opinion, the other side," published an article with many of the same false biographical details from the e-mail in the weeks before Obama announced for president -- that he was "Raised in Muslim lands and educated in Muslim schools." He said in an interview that Obama's "alliance with Islam" was "all over the Internet," a source he often considers more trustworthy than the mainstream media.
Around the same time Ted Sampley, a North Carolina man who runs his own Web site, published a similar piece. In an interview, he denied authorship of the e-mail, but said he did not doubt that his article had provided source material. "That's the miracle of it," Sampley said. "Once it takes off, and people start posting it on Web sites, you really have no idea how far it goes or who reads it. You get a ripple effect. It's like a little pebble and then it gets bigger and bigger."
Poring over these early articles on the topic, Allen noticed what she thought was an important pattern. In each instance, someone had posted the articles on the Free Republic Web site, prompting a discussion involving the same handful of people, with several expressing a desire to spread the word about Obama's supposed faith.
Keeper of the Obama File
Of the file folders that are spread in neat rows across Allen's desk, only one is bulging. It holds printouts of the reams of conversations about Obama's religion appearing on Free Republic. Since its start in 1996 by Jim Robinson of Fresno, Calif., the site has grown into a home for discussion of all types -- though it is particularly noted for spirited political discussions dominated by conservatives and libertarians. Freepers, as they're called, converse with a varying degree of transparency. Most remain anonymous.
Allen counted 23 freepers among those engaging in regular discussions about Obama's religion, and isolated a handful whom she began to suspect as having a role in the e-mail. Sifting through hundreds of postings, she began to piece together their identities. There was "Beckwith," whom she pegged as a veteran from Boston, old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy, in uniform by 1964, and host of a Web site that devotes considerable space to an "Obama file" that says the senator is "by birth, blood and training, a Muslim."
Allen found Beckwith discussing the matter in a Jan. 13 clip from a Web-based conservative radio show based in San Diego. In his thick Boston brogue, Beckwith told hosts Jeff Lynch and Mike Howard that Obama's "relationship to Islam is the big question. When one investigates the background of Obama's conversion, I can find no record of his baptism."
"Wow! Interesting!" Lynch gasped.
"This guy could easily be the Muslim Manchurian candidate," Howard said.
As Allen scanned his postings on Free Republic, she noticed that Beckwith repeated several phrases that also surface in the e-mail. Beckwith called Obama "an apostate Muslim, educated in madrassas." And when Beckwith later repudiated the "madrassa" claim -- after it was debunked by the mainstream media -- the term disappeared from subsequent versions of the chain e-mail.
The Post located Beckwith in a Boston suburb, and he agreed to be interviewed under the condition that he not be identified because "I get a lot of really nutty stuff and some of it's threatening." The 69-year-old said he is retired as a software engineer and lives alone, but for brief stints babysitting for his grandchildren. He said he started a Web site in 2005 "because I don't play golf." His initial goal was to take swats at the liberal left. "Then this new guy comes along called Obama," he said.
Beckwith said he built a Web site that features hundreds of pages of material intended to undermine Obama. "If 20 percent of what's on my Web site is true, this guy is a clear and present danger," Beckwith said. (He later added, "I try very hard to be accurate.") But while Beckwith speaks with pride about his research -- much of which he credits to an unnamed "colleague" in Europe -- and to his extensive Obama files, he rejects outright the suggestion that he authored the chain e-mail. "I've never been involved with any e-mailings. Period," he said.
Another Free Republic participant who attracted Allen's interest went by the handle "Eva." She was one of the first to write on the site about Obama's religion -- in November 2006 she began repeating the phrase "Once a Muslim, always a Muslim," when discussing Obama.
With the help of Allen's biographical sketch, The Post located Eva in rural Washington state. She is Donna Shaw, 60, a teacher who said Obama's ability to captivate audiences made her deeply uneasy because his "tone and cadence" reminded her of the child revivalist con-man preacher Marjoe Gortner.
Shaw says she has done extensive online research about Obama but believes many of the initial sites that provided "proof" of his Muslim background have been removed from the Internet: "Everything about his Muslim background was readily available on the Web in 2004. But they were all cleared from the Internet before he ran for Senate." Shaw says she's always had a hankering for politics. Probably, she muses, that's because her father served for a spell as a New Jersey state assemblyman. He was driven out, she notes without a hint of irony, when he became the victim of a 1950s smear campaign that wrongly accused him of being a communist.
When asked about the Obama e-mail, she says evenly: "I've never seen the e-mail. I don't get any political e-mails. I have a good filter on that."
Old Tactic, New Twist
The idea of unsubstantiated charges whispered through gossip trails has been a tried-and-true political technique since well before Machiavelli's time, Allen said. Traditionally, the best approach to combating them has been to "flush the charges out into the open."
That was easier when the rumors flew off a printing press, or when they appeared -- as with Swift boat attacks against Kerry -- in television ads paid for by a well-funded group of partisans.
The attacks on Obama are different, Allen says. The level of anonymity, the technical efficiency, and above all the electoral impact of Internet-based smears all represent a new challenge.
"What I've come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other," she says. A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. "No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish -- moving on their own, but also in unison.
Obama's campaign, for better or worse, is writing the manual on combating this new asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. Obama has not shied away from the rumors -- he mentions them frequently. "Before I begin," he told a pro-Israel group this month, "I want to say that I know some provocative e-mails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. . . . They're filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for president. And all I want to say is -- let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening."
Allen says the casual pushback and aggressive response plan could provide the model politicians will follow in the future. But she remains uncertain it will work.
"Citizens and political scientists must face the fact that the Internet has enabled a new form of political organization that is just as influential on local and national elections as unions and political action committees," she says. "This kind of misinformation campaign short-circuits judgment. It also aggressively disregards the fundamental principle of free societies that one be able to debate one's accusers."
For proof of this, Allen says, she need look no further than her e-mail inbox. After months of research, a new chain-mail smear against Obama arrived with an innocuous subject line: "Food for thought."
Research editor Lucy Shackelford and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Obama Poised for Huge Cash Edge
Democrats Could Swamp McCain With $500 Million in Final Two Months
By RICK KLEIN
June 19, 2008 —
Sen. Barack Obama's decision to forgo public financing for his presidential campaign clears the way for him to outspend Sen. John McCain by 3-to-1 or substantially more in the general election, a financial edge that dramatically rewrites the playbooks for both candidates.
With the possibility of spending perhaps $500 million just in the final two months of the campaign, Obama will be the first major-party candidate to enjoy a spending edge in the general election in more than 30 years. The comparison with the consistently cash-strapped McCain campaign could hardly be more stark.
"It'll be like George Steinbrenner's Yankees in the '90s an All-Star at every position against the '90s Kansas City Royals, barely able to meet their payroll," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.
Though Obama risks a short-term political backlash by seeming to go back on his word, Democratic and Republican strategists say most campaigns would take such a hit in exchange for the unprecedented cash advantage he'll derive.
McCain said Thursday he will accept public financing, meaning he'll be limited to spending only $84.1 million in the critical window between the Republican National Convention and Election Day. He'll be forced to lean more heavily on the Republican National Committee and outside groups that he cannot legally coordinate spending decisions with.
In that same time period, Obama will continue to be free to raise and spend unlimited amounts with advertising specialists and party insiders projecting that he will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, utilizing and expanding on the most efficient fundraising operation in American political history.
"He's going to be able to raise almost unimaginable amount of money," said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who was a top adviser in the Gore and Kerry campaigns. "This is an incredible advantage for him and his campaign. He'll be able to dictate the terms of this election."
"This is bigger than Obama being ahead in the polls," Devine continued. "This means he can be the aggressor."
Some party strategists say Obama could use his immense cash advantage to run a national ad campaign akin to marketing drives run by companies like McDonald's and Nike, while simultaneously engaging in targeted, state-level organizing that could leave McCain on the defensive in states that have rarely been competitive in years past.
On Thursday, Obama released his first ad since wrapping up the Democratic nomination, and it hints at the potential scope of ad buys to come. His message will run in 18 states, including perennial Republican strongholds Alaska, Montana, North Carolina, and North Dakota, as well as classic swing states Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"If the ad buy looks like this in October, this election's over," said Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "He's competing in red states, and he doesn't even feel he needs to advertise in blue states."
Obama's decision could also hasten the end of the post-Watergate campaign-financing system that has leveled presidential playing fields for more than three decades. Both major-party candidates have opted into the public campaign-finance system since it was put into place in time for the 1976 elections.
The system which relies on money from taxpayer check-offs selected by fewer than 10 percent of tax filers has been widely criticized in recent years, and both McCain and Obama have expressed interest in making revisions.
"When at least one candidate isn't taking money at all, and 90 percent of taxpayers aren't paying into the system, you know something's wrong with the system," said Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending.
Bob Bauer, the Obama campaign's general counsel, told reporters in Washington Thursday that Obama would push to update the system in time for the 2012 elections.
"That architecture has to be revamped," Bauer said. "There are & measures to do just that for both the primary and the general that I think will restore its viability as a vehicle make it attractive and bring candidates back to public funding beginning in the 2012 presidential election."
Obama has already shattered monthly campaign fund-raising records, and is on pace to obliterate all previous markers. He has raised more than $250 million just through the end of April for his primary campaign.
With nearly half of his money coming from donors who've given less than $200, he can tap most of his 1.5 million donors repeatedly before they reach the maximum of $2,300 each. That's not even counting the pool of Hillary Clinton donors available to him now that she has left the race.
Obama's spending could reach a saturation point: Even corporate giants know there's such a thing as too much messaging to throw at consumers. Both candidates will get wide press coverage throughout the campaign, and such "free media" can be just as important in an election's outcome.
The McCain campaign is hoping Obama's decision will tarnish his image as a reformer. Obama committed publicly to pursuing an agreement with McCain that would involve both of them taking public dollars, only to abandon it less than two weeks after he became the presumptive Democratic nominee, with Clinton's exit.
"This election is about a lot of things but it's also about trust. It's also about whether you can take people's word," McCain said Thursday in Iowa.
The candidates' spending doesn't tell the whole story, since other organizations chip in. Republicans will be able to compete financially through the auspices of the RNC which has done a far better job raising money than its Democratic counterpart and outside groups, which played a major role in 2004 and are already spending this year.
But, Goldstein said, a critical difference will be that the Obama campaign will have full control of its resources, while the McCain campaign will have to lean on outside groups with which it cannot, by law, discuss strategy or messaging.
"It not only gives him tons of money, more importantly, it gives him tons of control," Goldstein said. "Obama can freeze the race. It can put so much money up there that it spends McCain into oblivion."
Devine said that Kerry's decision to accept public funds in 2004 was "one of the biggest mistakes we made" in the campaign. Kerry had to make his money last five weeks longer than President Bush did, because of the timing of the two conventions, and Kerry was not advertising on television at all when the Swift boat attacks began in August.
With Obama already up in the polls and the likelihood of a big Election Day for Democrats nationwide the financial edge could be the last piece Obama needs, Lehane said.
"The resource advantage on top of the current trends is a potential game-changer," he said.
"This is a completely different paradigm from the way presidential campaigns have been run over the last 20 or 25 years."
ABC's David Chalian and Bret Hovell contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
By RICK KLEIN
June 19, 2008 —
Sen. Barack Obama's decision to forgo public financing for his presidential campaign clears the way for him to outspend Sen. John McCain by 3-to-1 or substantially more in the general election, a financial edge that dramatically rewrites the playbooks for both candidates.
With the possibility of spending perhaps $500 million just in the final two months of the campaign, Obama will be the first major-party candidate to enjoy a spending edge in the general election in more than 30 years. The comparison with the consistently cash-strapped McCain campaign could hardly be more stark.
"It'll be like George Steinbrenner's Yankees in the '90s an All-Star at every position against the '90s Kansas City Royals, barely able to meet their payroll," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.
Though Obama risks a short-term political backlash by seeming to go back on his word, Democratic and Republican strategists say most campaigns would take such a hit in exchange for the unprecedented cash advantage he'll derive.
McCain said Thursday he will accept public financing, meaning he'll be limited to spending only $84.1 million in the critical window between the Republican National Convention and Election Day. He'll be forced to lean more heavily on the Republican National Committee and outside groups that he cannot legally coordinate spending decisions with.
In that same time period, Obama will continue to be free to raise and spend unlimited amounts with advertising specialists and party insiders projecting that he will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, utilizing and expanding on the most efficient fundraising operation in American political history.
"He's going to be able to raise almost unimaginable amount of money," said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who was a top adviser in the Gore and Kerry campaigns. "This is an incredible advantage for him and his campaign. He'll be able to dictate the terms of this election."
"This is bigger than Obama being ahead in the polls," Devine continued. "This means he can be the aggressor."
Some party strategists say Obama could use his immense cash advantage to run a national ad campaign akin to marketing drives run by companies like McDonald's and Nike, while simultaneously engaging in targeted, state-level organizing that could leave McCain on the defensive in states that have rarely been competitive in years past.
On Thursday, Obama released his first ad since wrapping up the Democratic nomination, and it hints at the potential scope of ad buys to come. His message will run in 18 states, including perennial Republican strongholds Alaska, Montana, North Carolina, and North Dakota, as well as classic swing states Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"If the ad buy looks like this in October, this election's over," said Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "He's competing in red states, and he doesn't even feel he needs to advertise in blue states."
Obama's decision could also hasten the end of the post-Watergate campaign-financing system that has leveled presidential playing fields for more than three decades. Both major-party candidates have opted into the public campaign-finance system since it was put into place in time for the 1976 elections.
The system which relies on money from taxpayer check-offs selected by fewer than 10 percent of tax filers has been widely criticized in recent years, and both McCain and Obama have expressed interest in making revisions.
"When at least one candidate isn't taking money at all, and 90 percent of taxpayers aren't paying into the system, you know something's wrong with the system," said Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks political spending.
Bob Bauer, the Obama campaign's general counsel, told reporters in Washington Thursday that Obama would push to update the system in time for the 2012 elections.
"That architecture has to be revamped," Bauer said. "There are & measures to do just that for both the primary and the general that I think will restore its viability as a vehicle make it attractive and bring candidates back to public funding beginning in the 2012 presidential election."
Obama has already shattered monthly campaign fund-raising records, and is on pace to obliterate all previous markers. He has raised more than $250 million just through the end of April for his primary campaign.
With nearly half of his money coming from donors who've given less than $200, he can tap most of his 1.5 million donors repeatedly before they reach the maximum of $2,300 each. That's not even counting the pool of Hillary Clinton donors available to him now that she has left the race.
Obama's spending could reach a saturation point: Even corporate giants know there's such a thing as too much messaging to throw at consumers. Both candidates will get wide press coverage throughout the campaign, and such "free media" can be just as important in an election's outcome.
The McCain campaign is hoping Obama's decision will tarnish his image as a reformer. Obama committed publicly to pursuing an agreement with McCain that would involve both of them taking public dollars, only to abandon it less than two weeks after he became the presumptive Democratic nominee, with Clinton's exit.
"This election is about a lot of things but it's also about trust. It's also about whether you can take people's word," McCain said Thursday in Iowa.
The candidates' spending doesn't tell the whole story, since other organizations chip in. Republicans will be able to compete financially through the auspices of the RNC which has done a far better job raising money than its Democratic counterpart and outside groups, which played a major role in 2004 and are already spending this year.
But, Goldstein said, a critical difference will be that the Obama campaign will have full control of its resources, while the McCain campaign will have to lean on outside groups with which it cannot, by law, discuss strategy or messaging.
"It not only gives him tons of money, more importantly, it gives him tons of control," Goldstein said. "Obama can freeze the race. It can put so much money up there that it spends McCain into oblivion."
Devine said that Kerry's decision to accept public funds in 2004 was "one of the biggest mistakes we made" in the campaign. Kerry had to make his money last five weeks longer than President Bush did, because of the timing of the two conventions, and Kerry was not advertising on television at all when the Swift boat attacks began in August.
With Obama already up in the polls and the likelihood of a big Election Day for Democrats nationwide the financial edge could be the last piece Obama needs, Lehane said.
"The resource advantage on top of the current trends is a potential game-changer," he said.
"This is a completely different paradigm from the way presidential campaigns have been run over the last 20 or 25 years."
ABC's David Chalian and Bret Hovell contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Thursday, June 19, 2008
November's Magic Numbers
June 12, 2008
November's Magic Numbers
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- Presidential politics, like football, chess and other rule-bound competitions, is simple in objective but complex in execution. The objective is 270 electoral votes. This year the execution will turn on numbers such as:
48.3: In 2004, John Kerry won that percentage of the popular vote, the strongest showing ever by someone losing to a re-elected president. The lesson of this is that Democrats start from a position of strength.
251: That was John Kerry's electoral vote total. Barack Obama stands a better chance of holding Kerry's 19 states and the District of Columbia, and finding 19 more votes, than John McCain does of holding all 31 of Bush's states. Obama might capture the 2004 red states New Mexico (5 electoral votes), Nevada (5) and Colorado (9) - George W. Bush won them by a combined 127,011 votes -- giving him 270. McCain, who in his 10-year campaign for the presidency has lingered in New Hampshire long enough to vote as a resident, might turn it red, gaining 4 votes. Obama, however, has reasonable hopes of winning Iowa (7), which Al Gore won by 4,144 votes out of 1,315,563 cast in 2000. Bush won it in 2004 by 10,059 out of 1,506,908 cast. And Obama's estimated 90,000 caucus votes this year almost equaled the combined 118,167 won by Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, McCain, Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who finished in that order. Furthermore, Obama might carry Virginia (13).
Bush won it with 54 percent in 2004, but rapid demographic changes favor Democrats and Obama won this year's primary with 623,141 votes while McCain was beating Mike Huckabee with 244,135. And should former Sen. Sam Nunn be his running mate, Obama might win Georgia. Obama's 700,366 primary votes were more than Huckabee's 326,069 and McCain's 303,639, combined.
41 and 21: Obama lost by 41 points the primary in West Virginia, which is contiguous to Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes), where he lost the primary by 10 points, partly because, as in West Virginia, he was unappealing to blue-collar whites. McCain might hope to win Pennsylvania -- assuming that Obama's running mate is not the state's popular Gov. Ed Rendell.
7.2 percent and negative 1.2 percent: Michigan's first-quarter unemployment rate of 7.2 was the nation's worst and Michigan was one of just three states, and the only Midwest state, whose economies contracted (Michigan's by 1.2 percent) in 2007. Democrats misgovern Michigan, so McCain, especially if running with native son Mitt Romney, might hope to turn Michigan, with its 17 electoral votes, red for the first time since 1988.
55: California has that many electoral votes, more than one-fifth of 270. McCain, who likely will be relying on $84.1 million taxpayer dollars, cannot afford to compete in California.
15: Obama, probably relying on voluntary contributions, will have enough to spend speculative millions on, say, North Carolina (15). In 2004, Bush won it with 1,961,166 votes (56 percent) but in this year's primary, where turnout was below what it will be in November, Obama (875,683) and Clinton (652,824) received 1,528,507, slightly more than Kerry received in the 2004 general election.
56: That is the number of jurisdictions that will be deciding the allocation of the 270. There are 50 states and the District of Columbia. Maine and Nebraska, however, award two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote, and one to whichever candidate carries each congressional district. Maine has two districts, Nebraska three. Since the two states decided to abandon winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes (Maine in 1969, Nebraska in 1991), each state's congressional districts have not differed in their presidential preferences. But Nebraska's Second District is, essentially, Omaha. Obama might sense an opportunity.
4: That is the number of commas in the number of possible combinations of jurisdictions that can give a candidate 270 or more electoral votes. The votes disposed by the jurisdictions range from one (the Maine and Nebraska congressional districts) to three (7 states and D.C.) to California's 55, with 17 different numbers between three and 55.
2016: Assuming, not rashly, that Barack Obama wins, 2016 is the next time Hillary Clinton, who will then be 68, can seek the Democratic nomination. By then, the median age of the electorate will be 47, so for many millions of voters, Bill Clinton's tenure will seem only slightly less distant than Grover Cleveland's, the last Democratic presidency that did not make sensible citizens wince.
georgewill@washpost.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/by_the_numbers.html at June 12, 2008 - 08:36:15 AM PDT
_
November's Magic Numbers
By George Will
WASHINGTON -- Presidential politics, like football, chess and other rule-bound competitions, is simple in objective but complex in execution. The objective is 270 electoral votes. This year the execution will turn on numbers such as:
48.3: In 2004, John Kerry won that percentage of the popular vote, the strongest showing ever by someone losing to a re-elected president. The lesson of this is that Democrats start from a position of strength.
251: That was John Kerry's electoral vote total. Barack Obama stands a better chance of holding Kerry's 19 states and the District of Columbia, and finding 19 more votes, than John McCain does of holding all 31 of Bush's states. Obama might capture the 2004 red states New Mexico (5 electoral votes), Nevada (5) and Colorado (9) - George W. Bush won them by a combined 127,011 votes -- giving him 270. McCain, who in his 10-year campaign for the presidency has lingered in New Hampshire long enough to vote as a resident, might turn it red, gaining 4 votes. Obama, however, has reasonable hopes of winning Iowa (7), which Al Gore won by 4,144 votes out of 1,315,563 cast in 2000. Bush won it in 2004 by 10,059 out of 1,506,908 cast. And Obama's estimated 90,000 caucus votes this year almost equaled the combined 118,167 won by Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, McCain, Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who finished in that order. Furthermore, Obama might carry Virginia (13).
Bush won it with 54 percent in 2004, but rapid demographic changes favor Democrats and Obama won this year's primary with 623,141 votes while McCain was beating Mike Huckabee with 244,135. And should former Sen. Sam Nunn be his running mate, Obama might win Georgia. Obama's 700,366 primary votes were more than Huckabee's 326,069 and McCain's 303,639, combined.
41 and 21: Obama lost by 41 points the primary in West Virginia, which is contiguous to Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes), where he lost the primary by 10 points, partly because, as in West Virginia, he was unappealing to blue-collar whites. McCain might hope to win Pennsylvania -- assuming that Obama's running mate is not the state's popular Gov. Ed Rendell.
7.2 percent and negative 1.2 percent: Michigan's first-quarter unemployment rate of 7.2 was the nation's worst and Michigan was one of just three states, and the only Midwest state, whose economies contracted (Michigan's by 1.2 percent) in 2007. Democrats misgovern Michigan, so McCain, especially if running with native son Mitt Romney, might hope to turn Michigan, with its 17 electoral votes, red for the first time since 1988.
55: California has that many electoral votes, more than one-fifth of 270. McCain, who likely will be relying on $84.1 million taxpayer dollars, cannot afford to compete in California.
15: Obama, probably relying on voluntary contributions, will have enough to spend speculative millions on, say, North Carolina (15). In 2004, Bush won it with 1,961,166 votes (56 percent) but in this year's primary, where turnout was below what it will be in November, Obama (875,683) and Clinton (652,824) received 1,528,507, slightly more than Kerry received in the 2004 general election.
56: That is the number of jurisdictions that will be deciding the allocation of the 270. There are 50 states and the District of Columbia. Maine and Nebraska, however, award two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote, and one to whichever candidate carries each congressional district. Maine has two districts, Nebraska three. Since the two states decided to abandon winner-take-all allocation of their electoral votes (Maine in 1969, Nebraska in 1991), each state's congressional districts have not differed in their presidential preferences. But Nebraska's Second District is, essentially, Omaha. Obama might sense an opportunity.
4: That is the number of commas in the number of possible combinations of jurisdictions that can give a candidate 270 or more electoral votes. The votes disposed by the jurisdictions range from one (the Maine and Nebraska congressional districts) to three (7 states and D.C.) to California's 55, with 17 different numbers between three and 55.
2016: Assuming, not rashly, that Barack Obama wins, 2016 is the next time Hillary Clinton, who will then be 68, can seek the Democratic nomination. By then, the median age of the electorate will be 47, so for many millions of voters, Bill Clinton's tenure will seem only slightly less distant than Grover Cleveland's, the last Democratic presidency that did not make sensible citizens wince.
georgewill@washpost.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/06/by_the_numbers.html at June 12, 2008 - 08:36:15 AM PDT
_
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Obama and the Essence of Critical Support By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
So, I watched Senator Obama’s speech Tuesday night and thought to myself how, despite every reservation I have had about Senator Obama’s politics, I was moved by the moment. Deep inside me I had always expected that a conservative Black candidate could emerge at some point, but I thought that it was very unlikely that a liberal-to-progressive could, in the near future, emerge and win the nomination.
The color line has not been shattered. It has been further bent. It has been rendered more complex by the rise of a nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America who is of African descent. His emergence challenges the history of the USA, even if his politics are not on the Left. The fact that he was forced, through events, to articulate the clearest and most eloquent analysis on race in the USA by a mainstream politician, made this campaign particularly significant. What is even more significant is that Senator Obama is correct: this campaign is not actually about him, but it is about a very deep desire on the part of millions of people in the USA for change. How that “change” will be defined is not primarily a question for who gets elected in November. It is a question for those of us in the field who have contending visions for what the USA and the world should look like.
I sat in front of the TV transfixed, knowing that this was an historic moment, irrespective of whether Senator Obama wins or loses in November. I, for one, will continue to critically support him. This means that I do think that there is a VERY significant different between Senators Obama and McCain. This is not a tweedle-dee/tweedle-dumb juxtaposition, even given my differences with Senator Obama. Senator McCain wishes to continue the direction of George Bush and to advance the process of the consolidation of a neo-liberal authoritarian state. Senator Obama is looking for a politically liberal solution to the current crisis. I do not think that such a solution exists, but I do think that there is an opening for progressives to push for genuine alternative political and economic solutions to the crises afflicting the USA and the planet as a whole. This will inevitably mean challenging and pushing Senator Obama on matters such as foreign policy and healthcare. This is the essence of critical support; actively supporting his candidacy while at the same time not being shy concerning expressing our differences.
Yes, this was and is an historic moment. There is, however, little time to relish in this moment because it will soon pass. If we are not thinking both about building for an Obama victory, but more importantly, laying the foundation for stronger social movements and a mass political organization that can advance a progressive direction, we will have misunderstood our challenge and fallen prey to illusions. Taking nothing away from Senator Obama’s own brilliance, he stands today as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party because of a groundswell of anger and hope that exists across the USA. It is up to progressives to do more than simply acknowledge this; we must help to gel it into a wave.
BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of the just released book, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher
The color line has not been shattered. It has been further bent. It has been rendered more complex by the rise of a nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America who is of African descent. His emergence challenges the history of the USA, even if his politics are not on the Left. The fact that he was forced, through events, to articulate the clearest and most eloquent analysis on race in the USA by a mainstream politician, made this campaign particularly significant. What is even more significant is that Senator Obama is correct: this campaign is not actually about him, but it is about a very deep desire on the part of millions of people in the USA for change. How that “change” will be defined is not primarily a question for who gets elected in November. It is a question for those of us in the field who have contending visions for what the USA and the world should look like.
I sat in front of the TV transfixed, knowing that this was an historic moment, irrespective of whether Senator Obama wins or loses in November. I, for one, will continue to critically support him. This means that I do think that there is a VERY significant different between Senators Obama and McCain. This is not a tweedle-dee/tweedle-dumb juxtaposition, even given my differences with Senator Obama. Senator McCain wishes to continue the direction of George Bush and to advance the process of the consolidation of a neo-liberal authoritarian state. Senator Obama is looking for a politically liberal solution to the current crisis. I do not think that such a solution exists, but I do think that there is an opening for progressives to push for genuine alternative political and economic solutions to the crises afflicting the USA and the planet as a whole. This will inevitably mean challenging and pushing Senator Obama on matters such as foreign policy and healthcare. This is the essence of critical support; actively supporting his candidacy while at the same time not being shy concerning expressing our differences.
Yes, this was and is an historic moment. There is, however, little time to relish in this moment because it will soon pass. If we are not thinking both about building for an Obama victory, but more importantly, laying the foundation for stronger social movements and a mass political organization that can advance a progressive direction, we will have misunderstood our challenge and fallen prey to illusions. Taking nothing away from Senator Obama’s own brilliance, he stands today as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party because of a groundswell of anger and hope that exists across the USA. It is up to progressives to do more than simply acknowledge this; we must help to gel it into a wave.
BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of the just released book, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher
What Obama’s Democratic Party Nomination Victory Means Election Analysis By Dr. Martin Kilson, PhD
Prologue
It’s mid-day Wednesday June 4, 2008, and as I write these brief reflections on “What Obama’s Democratic Party Nomination Victory Means,” the first thing I can think of is that this extraordinary achievement ranks alongside “Juneteenth” - the news of the victory of the Union over the Confederacy, news of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. That awesome Civil War-ending news reached thousands of Negro communities around the country at varying times during the month of June 1865, and as that awesome God-inspired news fell on the trembling ears of the former slaves - children, mothers, fathers, grandparents - they cried glorious tears and uttered glorious prayer, and these culminated eventually in “Juneteenth Celebrations” across Black America.
In announcing the extraordinary Barack Obama achievement to the nation, the New York Times front-page headline read: “After Grueling Battle, Obama Claims Nomination”. Here in Boston where I reside, the front-page headline of the Boston Globe read: “Obama Clinches Nomination: Clinton Not Conceding Defeat.”
The Boston Globe was, I felt, bold to inform the nation graphically of the “dark side” of what that New York Times headline dubbed a “Grueling Battle” - namely, that Hillary Clinton couldn’t muster enough “basic class-and-decency,” let’s call it, to extend a simple welcoming congratulation to Senator Barack Obama, a simple welcoming congratulation to America’s first African-American presidential candidate of a major political party. What makes this instance of Clintonian power-obsessive pettiness-and-rudeness so awful is that the African-American voter-bloc provided the predictable and consistent electoral support that facilitated Bill Clinton’s election as president both in 1992 and 1996.
Interface of Barack Obama & Martin Luther King
Be that as it may, with the announcement of Senator Barack Obama’s nomination victory on Tuesday evening June 3, 2008, we can all ascent to Obama’s comment at a massive victory rally of 32,000 in St. Paul, Minnesota, that his achievement enables liberal and progressive Americans to fashion “a better future” for our country. Obama continued:
“Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another, a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. ...I face this challenge...with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.”
With these keen revitalizing characterizations regarding what his achievement of the Democratic nomination can mean for the country, Senator Obama was treading in the revitalization-of-America-footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, so to speak. And few scholars of King’s era have characterized the revitalization-of-America-footsteps of Dr. King as cogently as his greatest biographer Taylor Branch:
[Dr. King’s] appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. ‘We will win our freedom’, he said many times, ‘because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of god are embodied in our echoing demands.’ To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy - even as racial healers and reconcilers - is to diminish them under the spell of myth. Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. (Taylor Branch, “The Last Wish of Martin Luther King”, The New York Times (April 6, 2008)) [Emphasis Added]
Accordingly, Senator Barack Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination is a special proclamation to the millions-on-millions of us Americans who grasp the fullness of Martin Luther King as a “modern founder of democracy.” A proclamation for a new political, civic, and moral activism to revitalize American democracy in order, as Obama put it Tuesday evening, “to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.”
Problem Areas an Obama Presidency Must Confront: (I) Iraq War
Of course, the steps and avenues to this end will be various and debatable, as they should be. Yet I feel certain that with the election of Senator Obama in November to the presidency of the United States, the road to a revitalized America must address straightaway two enormous problem-areas in American life. One problem-area is, of course, the monstrous Iraq War. The second problem-area is the horrific incarceration-crisis facing African-American males. An Obama presidency can, I believe, lay the groundwork for a broad revitalization of American democracy by tackling these two systemically crippling, morally crippling, and American citizens’ life-cycle crippling problem-areas.
Still today, too many of our American countrymen and countrywomen lack full understanding of just how monstrous the Iraq War has been, for us and for Iraq’s citizens. For starters, the Iraq War is the second longest war the country has experienced, save the Vietnam War. Not only have nearly 2 million soldiers served in Iraq but 30% have two-plus years of service there. Over 4000 have bravely given the ultimate service - their lives - some 60,000 wounded, injured, etc., many with horrendous injuries.
Beyond the massive loss of life and damage to thousands of American soldiers, the Iraq War’s damage to America’s economic life and well-being is extraordinary. First of all, it is hard to believe that after World War II the Iraq War is our country’s most costly war. As of March 2008, the Iraq War has claimed $600 billion of our country’s wealth. And as a data-rich article by Professor Linda Bilmes of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government (“Another Year - Another $300 Billion” Boston Globe (March 16, 2008)) points out:
That $600 billion figure ignores four major costs. First, there are additional war-related costs buried in places such as the non-Iraq defense budget. That budget has grown by $500 billion cumulatively since the beginning of the war. ...Second, the $600 billion excludes the cost of providing medical care and disability compensation for veterans. ...Third, the $600 billion does not take into account the cost to "reset" the military - to replace equipment and restore personnel to prewar levels of readiness.
Thus, with the election of Senator Barack Obama as president in November there’s something equivalent to certainty that, I think, an end to the monstrous Iraq War will occur. A monstrous war that, according to Linda Blimes, “the cash cost of each month we continue in Iraq is $12 billion....” And, of course, what’s worse are the long-range systemic costs and costs to life-cycle well-being of American citizens. Here, too, Linda Blimes’ informs us candidly:
...The war has weakened our economy, increased oil prices, and made it more difficult for us to fund road projects, schools, medical research, and other vital needs. Apart from the oil companies and a handful of defense contractors, the war has not stimulated the economy. Perhaps most painful to consider is the opportunity cost: the money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all American children.
No doubt, ending the monstrous Iraq War will be an uphill battle for an Obama presidency, given the numerous establishmentarian systemic power-blocs intertwined with and dependent upon this war. As the Kennedy School of Government’s Linda Blimes points out in her study of the Iraq War: “The [Boston] Globe reported recently that the largest private contractor in Iraq, KBR [a company Vice President Cheney once headed] has dodged paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes by employing its workers through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.” Can you image such power-class skulduggery?
Problem Areas an Obama Presidency Must Confront: (II) Black Imprisonment
Just as the Iraq war must be high on the policy agenda of an Obama presidency, so too must the horrifically devastating and debased plight of nearly one million incarcerated African-Americans, mainly Black males, be high on the policy agenda of an Obama presidency. I was inspired to read in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 29, 2008) that the new executive secretary of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous - former director of the leading African-American newspaper association, the National Newspaper Publishers Association - places the plight of incarcerated African-Americans at the top of the NAACP’s new agenda. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “Jealous indicated that the most pressing issues for him [as new executive of NAACP] include the country’s incarceration rate, particularly of African-American men and boys, which far outpaces the rest of the world. Less than 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, yet the nation has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”
If a new head of the NAACP can get this great warhorse of African-American rights and progress to place the country’s horrific incarceration rate for Blacks at the top of its agenda, surely an Obama presidency can and must do the same. Today our country has 2.2 million souls in prisons - far beyond any other democratic nation and some authoritarian ones too, such as Russia, China, etc. - some 800,000-plus are African-Americans, Black males.
Research by BlackCommentator.com editorial board member Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University reported that by 2000 in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, Black males comprised on average between 50% and 80% of inmates in state and federal prisons. Professor Marable also reported that research by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights revealed the following:
...That while African Americans today [2000] constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions for drug offences. (See BlackCommentator.com, September 27, 2007)
Viewed from another vantage point, a Black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime, compared with a White male who has a 1 in 7 chance. What is worse - if that’s possible - the incarceration rates in this country are directly correlated with education performance, a finding reported this year by the Children Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. The Fund’s research uncovered that Black children are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than White children, and such children, in turn, disproportionately enter the vicious cycle of crime and imprisonment. As a study of this vicious cycle faced by our African-American youth published in the Boston Globe observed:
This “school-to-prison pipeline” begins in the nation’s neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country’s expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons. ...More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. (See Daniel Meyer, “Problem Students in Pipeline to Prison,” Boston Globe (May 28, 2008))
Concluding Note
As I remarked earlier in this article, Senator Barack Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination might be considered a special proclamation to millions-on-millions of Americans who understanding our country’s dire need for a new political, civic, and moral activism to revitalize American democracy. A new activism that, as Obama put it in his victory address in St. Paul, will enable us “to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.” I, for one among progressive Americans, believe that to achieve this under an Obama presidency, the two major problems-areas facing the country today of the Iraq War and the massive incarceration of African-American males must gain a top place in the public-policy agenda of an Obama presidency. Anything less than this will render an Obama presidency a disappointment from where I sit.
Meanwhile, we must still recognize that even with the most optimistic public-policy outcomes by an Obama presidency, there will remain many barriers to the revitalized American society and culture that the great Martin Luther King entertained. The tale of one such barrier can be found in the following report in the current issue of Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (Spring 2008):
A 55 year-old black woman named Ruth Simmons came to New York on an autumn shopping trip in the first year of the twentieth-first century and chose to examine the finery at Saks Fifth Avenue, one of the city’s premier emporiums. She soon became aware that her movements were being followed by the store’s security people, evidently fearful that she was a potential, if not likely, shoplifter. “And I greatly resented that,” she said in recounting the incident. To add to her distress that day, a taxi driver locked his door as Simmons neared so that she could not get in. What made these slights, endured daily and disproportionately by black Americans, worth noting is that Ruth Simmons is president of Brown University.
Even so, I and many millions of other Americans wish the best of good luck to a future Barack Obama presidency.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Martin Kilson, PhD hails from an African Methodist background and clergy: From a great-great grandfather who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in the 1840s; from a great-grandfather AME clergyman; from a Civil War veteran great-grandfather who founded an African Union Methodist Protestant church in Pennsylvania in 1885; and from an African Methodist clergyman father who pastored in an Eastern Pennsylvania mill town - Ambler, PA. He attended Lincoln University (PA), 1949-1953, and Harvard graduate school. Appointed in 1962 as the first African-American to teach in Harvard College, in 1969 he was the first African-American tenured at Harvard. He retired in 2003 as a Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus. His publications include: Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone (Harvard University Press, 1966); Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); New States in the Modern World (Center for International Affairs) (Harvard University Press, 1975); The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1976); The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African American Intelligentsia (Forthcoming. University of Missouri Press); and The Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1900-2008 (Forthcoming). Click here to contact Dr. Kilson.
It’s mid-day Wednesday June 4, 2008, and as I write these brief reflections on “What Obama’s Democratic Party Nomination Victory Means,” the first thing I can think of is that this extraordinary achievement ranks alongside “Juneteenth” - the news of the victory of the Union over the Confederacy, news of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. That awesome Civil War-ending news reached thousands of Negro communities around the country at varying times during the month of June 1865, and as that awesome God-inspired news fell on the trembling ears of the former slaves - children, mothers, fathers, grandparents - they cried glorious tears and uttered glorious prayer, and these culminated eventually in “Juneteenth Celebrations” across Black America.
In announcing the extraordinary Barack Obama achievement to the nation, the New York Times front-page headline read: “After Grueling Battle, Obama Claims Nomination”. Here in Boston where I reside, the front-page headline of the Boston Globe read: “Obama Clinches Nomination: Clinton Not Conceding Defeat.”
The Boston Globe was, I felt, bold to inform the nation graphically of the “dark side” of what that New York Times headline dubbed a “Grueling Battle” - namely, that Hillary Clinton couldn’t muster enough “basic class-and-decency,” let’s call it, to extend a simple welcoming congratulation to Senator Barack Obama, a simple welcoming congratulation to America’s first African-American presidential candidate of a major political party. What makes this instance of Clintonian power-obsessive pettiness-and-rudeness so awful is that the African-American voter-bloc provided the predictable and consistent electoral support that facilitated Bill Clinton’s election as president both in 1992 and 1996.
Interface of Barack Obama & Martin Luther King
Be that as it may, with the announcement of Senator Barack Obama’s nomination victory on Tuesday evening June 3, 2008, we can all ascent to Obama’s comment at a massive victory rally of 32,000 in St. Paul, Minnesota, that his achievement enables liberal and progressive Americans to fashion “a better future” for our country. Obama continued:
“Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another, a journey that will bring a new and better day to America. ...I face this challenge...with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment - this was time - when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.”
With these keen revitalizing characterizations regarding what his achievement of the Democratic nomination can mean for the country, Senator Obama was treading in the revitalization-of-America-footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, so to speak. And few scholars of King’s era have characterized the revitalization-of-America-footsteps of Dr. King as cogently as his greatest biographer Taylor Branch:
[Dr. King’s] appeal was rooted in the larger context of nonviolence. His stated purpose was always to redeem the soul of America. He put one foot in the Constitution and the other in scripture. ‘We will win our freedom’, he said many times, ‘because the heritage of our nation and the eternal will of god are embodied in our echoing demands.’ To see Dr. King and his colleagues as anything less than modern founders of democracy - even as racial healers and reconcilers - is to diminish them under the spell of myth. Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true. (Taylor Branch, “The Last Wish of Martin Luther King”, The New York Times (April 6, 2008)) [Emphasis Added]
Accordingly, Senator Barack Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination is a special proclamation to the millions-on-millions of us Americans who grasp the fullness of Martin Luther King as a “modern founder of democracy.” A proclamation for a new political, civic, and moral activism to revitalize American democracy in order, as Obama put it Tuesday evening, “to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.”
Problem Areas an Obama Presidency Must Confront: (I) Iraq War
Of course, the steps and avenues to this end will be various and debatable, as they should be. Yet I feel certain that with the election of Senator Obama in November to the presidency of the United States, the road to a revitalized America must address straightaway two enormous problem-areas in American life. One problem-area is, of course, the monstrous Iraq War. The second problem-area is the horrific incarceration-crisis facing African-American males. An Obama presidency can, I believe, lay the groundwork for a broad revitalization of American democracy by tackling these two systemically crippling, morally crippling, and American citizens’ life-cycle crippling problem-areas.
Still today, too many of our American countrymen and countrywomen lack full understanding of just how monstrous the Iraq War has been, for us and for Iraq’s citizens. For starters, the Iraq War is the second longest war the country has experienced, save the Vietnam War. Not only have nearly 2 million soldiers served in Iraq but 30% have two-plus years of service there. Over 4000 have bravely given the ultimate service - their lives - some 60,000 wounded, injured, etc., many with horrendous injuries.
Beyond the massive loss of life and damage to thousands of American soldiers, the Iraq War’s damage to America’s economic life and well-being is extraordinary. First of all, it is hard to believe that after World War II the Iraq War is our country’s most costly war. As of March 2008, the Iraq War has claimed $600 billion of our country’s wealth. And as a data-rich article by Professor Linda Bilmes of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government (“Another Year - Another $300 Billion” Boston Globe (March 16, 2008)) points out:
That $600 billion figure ignores four major costs. First, there are additional war-related costs buried in places such as the non-Iraq defense budget. That budget has grown by $500 billion cumulatively since the beginning of the war. ...Second, the $600 billion excludes the cost of providing medical care and disability compensation for veterans. ...Third, the $600 billion does not take into account the cost to "reset" the military - to replace equipment and restore personnel to prewar levels of readiness.
Thus, with the election of Senator Barack Obama as president in November there’s something equivalent to certainty that, I think, an end to the monstrous Iraq War will occur. A monstrous war that, according to Linda Blimes, “the cash cost of each month we continue in Iraq is $12 billion....” And, of course, what’s worse are the long-range systemic costs and costs to life-cycle well-being of American citizens. Here, too, Linda Blimes’ informs us candidly:
...The war has weakened our economy, increased oil prices, and made it more difficult for us to fund road projects, schools, medical research, and other vital needs. Apart from the oil companies and a handful of defense contractors, the war has not stimulated the economy. Perhaps most painful to consider is the opportunity cost: the money spent on the war could have fixed Social Security for the next 75 years or provided health insurance to all American children.
No doubt, ending the monstrous Iraq War will be an uphill battle for an Obama presidency, given the numerous establishmentarian systemic power-blocs intertwined with and dependent upon this war. As the Kennedy School of Government’s Linda Blimes points out in her study of the Iraq War: “The [Boston] Globe reported recently that the largest private contractor in Iraq, KBR [a company Vice President Cheney once headed] has dodged paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes by employing its workers through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.” Can you image such power-class skulduggery?
Problem Areas an Obama Presidency Must Confront: (II) Black Imprisonment
Just as the Iraq war must be high on the policy agenda of an Obama presidency, so too must the horrifically devastating and debased plight of nearly one million incarcerated African-Americans, mainly Black males, be high on the policy agenda of an Obama presidency. I was inspired to read in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 29, 2008) that the new executive secretary of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous - former director of the leading African-American newspaper association, the National Newspaper Publishers Association - places the plight of incarcerated African-Americans at the top of the NAACP’s new agenda. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “Jealous indicated that the most pressing issues for him [as new executive of NAACP] include the country’s incarceration rate, particularly of African-American men and boys, which far outpaces the rest of the world. Less than 5 percent of the world’s people live in the United States, yet the nation has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”
If a new head of the NAACP can get this great warhorse of African-American rights and progress to place the country’s horrific incarceration rate for Blacks at the top of its agenda, surely an Obama presidency can and must do the same. Today our country has 2.2 million souls in prisons - far beyond any other democratic nation and some authoritarian ones too, such as Russia, China, etc. - some 800,000-plus are African-Americans, Black males.
Research by BlackCommentator.com editorial board member Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University reported that by 2000 in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan, Black males comprised on average between 50% and 80% of inmates in state and federal prisons. Professor Marable also reported that research by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights revealed the following:
...That while African Americans today [2000] constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all convictions, and 75 percent of all prison admissions for drug offences. (See BlackCommentator.com, September 27, 2007)
Viewed from another vantage point, a Black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime, compared with a White male who has a 1 in 7 chance. What is worse - if that’s possible - the incarceration rates in this country are directly correlated with education performance, a finding reported this year by the Children Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. The Fund’s research uncovered that Black children are more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than White children, and such children, in turn, disproportionately enter the vicious cycle of crime and imprisonment. As a study of this vicious cycle faced by our African-American youth published in the Boston Globe observed:
This “school-to-prison pipeline” begins in the nation’s neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country’s expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons. ...More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. (See Daniel Meyer, “Problem Students in Pipeline to Prison,” Boston Globe (May 28, 2008))
Concluding Note
As I remarked earlier in this article, Senator Barack Obama’s winning the Democratic nomination might be considered a special proclamation to millions-on-millions of Americans who understanding our country’s dire need for a new political, civic, and moral activism to revitalize American democracy. A new activism that, as Obama put it in his victory address in St. Paul, will enable us “to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.” I, for one among progressive Americans, believe that to achieve this under an Obama presidency, the two major problems-areas facing the country today of the Iraq War and the massive incarceration of African-American males must gain a top place in the public-policy agenda of an Obama presidency. Anything less than this will render an Obama presidency a disappointment from where I sit.
Meanwhile, we must still recognize that even with the most optimistic public-policy outcomes by an Obama presidency, there will remain many barriers to the revitalized American society and culture that the great Martin Luther King entertained. The tale of one such barrier can be found in the following report in the current issue of Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (Spring 2008):
A 55 year-old black woman named Ruth Simmons came to New York on an autumn shopping trip in the first year of the twentieth-first century and chose to examine the finery at Saks Fifth Avenue, one of the city’s premier emporiums. She soon became aware that her movements were being followed by the store’s security people, evidently fearful that she was a potential, if not likely, shoplifter. “And I greatly resented that,” she said in recounting the incident. To add to her distress that day, a taxi driver locked his door as Simmons neared so that she could not get in. What made these slights, endured daily and disproportionately by black Americans, worth noting is that Ruth Simmons is president of Brown University.
Even so, I and many millions of other Americans wish the best of good luck to a future Barack Obama presidency.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Martin Kilson, PhD hails from an African Methodist background and clergy: From a great-great grandfather who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in the 1840s; from a great-grandfather AME clergyman; from a Civil War veteran great-grandfather who founded an African Union Methodist Protestant church in Pennsylvania in 1885; and from an African Methodist clergyman father who pastored in an Eastern Pennsylvania mill town - Ambler, PA. He attended Lincoln University (PA), 1949-1953, and Harvard graduate school. Appointed in 1962 as the first African-American to teach in Harvard College, in 1969 he was the first African-American tenured at Harvard. He retired in 2003 as a Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus. His publications include: Political Change in a West African State: A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone (Harvard University Press, 1966); Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); New States in the Modern World (Center for International Affairs) (Harvard University Press, 1975); The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1976); The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African American Intelligentsia (Forthcoming. University of Missouri Press); and The Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1900-2008 (Forthcoming). Click here to contact Dr. Kilson.
Color Test: Where Whites Draw the Line By MARCUS MABRY
June 8, 2008
How black is too black?
Millions of African-Americans celebrated Barack Obama’s historic victory, seeing in it a reflection — sudden and shocking — of their own expanded horizons. But whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as “postracial.”
In other words, Mr. Obama was black, but not too black.
But where is the line? Does it change over time? And if it is definable, then how black can Mr. Obama be before he alienates white voters? Or, to pose the question more cynically, how black do the Republicans have to make him to win?
Social observers say a common hallmark of African-Americans who have achieved the greatest success, whether in business, entertainment or politics — Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson and Mr. Obama — is that they do not convey a sense of black grievance.
Clearly, Mr. Obama understands this. Until his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced race into the political debate, Mr. Obama rarely dwelt on it. He gave his groundbreaking speech on race only in response to the Wright controversy.
Indeed, after he effectively won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, he left it to the media to point out the racial accomplishment, and the relative he thanked most emotively was the woman who raised him: his white grandmother.
There is a reason for this. Race is one of the most contentious issues in American society, and, as with many contentious issues, Americans like to choose the middle path between perceived extremes. “In many ways, Obama is an ideal middle way person — he is just as white as he is black,” said Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College.
John McWhorter, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, put it more bluntly: “White people are weary of the kinds of black people who are dedicated to indicting whites as racists. So, to be ‘too black’ is to carry an air about you that whites have something to answer for.”
That was the root of Mr. Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problem. Mr. Wright spewed exactly the kind of angry racial repudiation that many whites associate with black leaders.
Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that the one arena where black grievance is acceptable is in music, particularly in hip-hop, where an estimated 70 percent of listeners are white. But the generation exposed to hip-hop, mostly under 40, are part of what Mr. Patterson calls a growing “ecumenical” American culture that is unselfconsciously multiracial.
This Obama Generation came of age in the post-civil-rights age when color, though still relevant, had less impact on what one read, listened to or watched. It was the common crucible of popular culture, he said, that forged a truly American identity, rather than the “salad bowl” analogy cherished by diversity advocates.
Mr. Obama’s campaign so de-emphasized race that for most of the 17-month nomination contest much of the news media became obsessed with the question of whether he was “black enough” to win black votes.
Most African-American Democrats were for Hillary Clinton early on, until voters in Iowa proved to them that whites would support a black candidate.
Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. said that Mr. Obama, unlike the immediate successors of Martin Luther King Jr., understood the importance of language and the need to frame social debate in a way less likely to alienate whites.
“In the absence of Martin Luther King,” he said, “I think the void was filled by Stokely Carmichael, James Bevel and Jesse Jackson,” who did not use language as well. “With all respect to my father, 40 years later, this is the first time we have gotten back to a very thoughtful and careful approach to language.”
But a crucial difference between Dr. King and Mr. Obama, said the King biographer Taylor Branch, was that Dr. King sought to point out hypocrisy and shame white people into changing the system.
It was not simply framing and language choice that has helped Mr. Obama reach white people. He is genuinely of a different place and time than the generation of black leaders forged in the civil rights struggle. His story is, in part, an immigrant’s story, devoid of the particular wounds that descendants of American slaves carry.
His father was a black Kenyan and his mother a white American. His mixed-race heritage is less discomfiting to whites, Mr. McWhorter said, than the more common source of black Americans’ mixed-race blood: the miscegenation of slavery.
Mr. Obama’s generation of black political leaders have benefited from the gains of the civil rights movement, and are now attempting to broaden them. They include Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington; Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts; and former Representative Harold Ford Jr. from Tennessee. They attended top schools, often in the Ivy League and often law school as well, and began their public-service careers in community organizing rather than in national civil rights organizations.
So far, only Mr. Obama and Mr. Patrick have won offices that required large numbers of white voters to support them.
Mr. Ford made a run for the United States Senate, but fell short — thanks, in part, to suggestive ads by his opponent that featured a white actress.
The smaller and older generation of black Republicans who could aspire to high office seem to generate less white suspicion. The approval ratings of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — each the most popular members of George W. Bush’s cabinet during their respective tenures — suggest they would be among the most popular black candidates with non-black voters.
Patrick J. Buchanan, conservative commentator and former aspirant to the Republican presidential nomination, said it was Mr. Powell’s military credentials that made him appealing to whites.
“Barack Obama’s got problems — in central Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky — that Colin Powell wouldn’t have,” Mr. Buchanan said. “Colin Powell did his duty in Vietnam, he’s a soldier, a general.” (Mr. Obama was too young for Vietnam.)
For decades, pollsters have found that one of the prejudices white Americans commonly hold about African-Americans is a belief that blacks are less patriotic, despite serving in the armed forces in greater proportion than their share of the population.
Ms. Rice, who grew up in segregated Birmingham, sounded as if she were refuting that very prejudice when she was asked for her reaction to Mr. Obama’s race speech.
“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them, and that’s our legacy,” she told The Washington Times editorial board.
A rising generation of black leaders has opened up new possibilities. But so have the increasing levels of white tolerance. What is impossible to know, today, is how far that tolerance will extend.
For instance, Mr. Patterson said research consistently showed that roughly one in five whites continues to hold racist views. Indeed, a poll by the Pew Research Center in March found that 20 percent of white Democrats over the age of 44 found interracial dating unacceptable; only 3 percent of white Democrats under 44 felt that way.
Mr. Buchanan said Mr. Obama’s monolithic support among blacks was likely to stoke such white animosity.
“There’s a sense among some folks that if African-Americans are voting 90 percent for ‘one of us;’ then you’re going to vote for ‘one of us,’ ” he said. When Norm Kagan, a white 62-year-old supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s, was asked in St. Paul, Minn., if white voters in the state would support a black man, he immediately raised the specter of crime, as if the mere mention of blacks brought it to mind. “We’ve all had our problems,” he said. “Every now and then someone gets mugged or robbed. The most economically challenged — which are mostly black — are most often the criminals and not to be trusted.”
Some Republicans have used such associations to defeat Democrats. But political analysts point to signs that the culture-war tactics are losing steam. They note the Republican loss in 2006 of both houses of Congress, and the recent Democratic victories in traditionally Republican districts in special Congressional elections in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” about the G.O.P.’s political strategy since the 1960’s, said many of the issues like crime that allowed Republicans to divide and conquer no longer exist.
One of the biggest issues this year is the economic downturn. Shared distress may trump racial divisions, he said.
Democrats shouldn’t think that things will always be the way they have been, said Mr. Perlstein, a liberal. “Change does happen,” he said. “And it happens overnight.”
How black is too black?
Millions of African-Americans celebrated Barack Obama’s historic victory, seeing in it a reflection — sudden and shocking — of their own expanded horizons. But whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as “postracial.”
In other words, Mr. Obama was black, but not too black.
But where is the line? Does it change over time? And if it is definable, then how black can Mr. Obama be before he alienates white voters? Or, to pose the question more cynically, how black do the Republicans have to make him to win?
Social observers say a common hallmark of African-Americans who have achieved the greatest success, whether in business, entertainment or politics — Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson and Mr. Obama — is that they do not convey a sense of black grievance.
Clearly, Mr. Obama understands this. Until his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced race into the political debate, Mr. Obama rarely dwelt on it. He gave his groundbreaking speech on race only in response to the Wright controversy.
Indeed, after he effectively won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, he left it to the media to point out the racial accomplishment, and the relative he thanked most emotively was the woman who raised him: his white grandmother.
There is a reason for this. Race is one of the most contentious issues in American society, and, as with many contentious issues, Americans like to choose the middle path between perceived extremes. “In many ways, Obama is an ideal middle way person — he is just as white as he is black,” said Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College.
John McWhorter, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, put it more bluntly: “White people are weary of the kinds of black people who are dedicated to indicting whites as racists. So, to be ‘too black’ is to carry an air about you that whites have something to answer for.”
That was the root of Mr. Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problem. Mr. Wright spewed exactly the kind of angry racial repudiation that many whites associate with black leaders.
Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, argues that the one arena where black grievance is acceptable is in music, particularly in hip-hop, where an estimated 70 percent of listeners are white. But the generation exposed to hip-hop, mostly under 40, are part of what Mr. Patterson calls a growing “ecumenical” American culture that is unselfconsciously multiracial.
This Obama Generation came of age in the post-civil-rights age when color, though still relevant, had less impact on what one read, listened to or watched. It was the common crucible of popular culture, he said, that forged a truly American identity, rather than the “salad bowl” analogy cherished by diversity advocates.
Mr. Obama’s campaign so de-emphasized race that for most of the 17-month nomination contest much of the news media became obsessed with the question of whether he was “black enough” to win black votes.
Most African-American Democrats were for Hillary Clinton early on, until voters in Iowa proved to them that whites would support a black candidate.
Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. said that Mr. Obama, unlike the immediate successors of Martin Luther King Jr., understood the importance of language and the need to frame social debate in a way less likely to alienate whites.
“In the absence of Martin Luther King,” he said, “I think the void was filled by Stokely Carmichael, James Bevel and Jesse Jackson,” who did not use language as well. “With all respect to my father, 40 years later, this is the first time we have gotten back to a very thoughtful and careful approach to language.”
But a crucial difference between Dr. King and Mr. Obama, said the King biographer Taylor Branch, was that Dr. King sought to point out hypocrisy and shame white people into changing the system.
It was not simply framing and language choice that has helped Mr. Obama reach white people. He is genuinely of a different place and time than the generation of black leaders forged in the civil rights struggle. His story is, in part, an immigrant’s story, devoid of the particular wounds that descendants of American slaves carry.
His father was a black Kenyan and his mother a white American. His mixed-race heritage is less discomfiting to whites, Mr. McWhorter said, than the more common source of black Americans’ mixed-race blood: the miscegenation of slavery.
Mr. Obama’s generation of black political leaders have benefited from the gains of the civil rights movement, and are now attempting to broaden them. They include Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark; Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington; Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts; and former Representative Harold Ford Jr. from Tennessee. They attended top schools, often in the Ivy League and often law school as well, and began their public-service careers in community organizing rather than in national civil rights organizations.
So far, only Mr. Obama and Mr. Patrick have won offices that required large numbers of white voters to support them.
Mr. Ford made a run for the United States Senate, but fell short — thanks, in part, to suggestive ads by his opponent that featured a white actress.
The smaller and older generation of black Republicans who could aspire to high office seem to generate less white suspicion. The approval ratings of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — each the most popular members of George W. Bush’s cabinet during their respective tenures — suggest they would be among the most popular black candidates with non-black voters.
Patrick J. Buchanan, conservative commentator and former aspirant to the Republican presidential nomination, said it was Mr. Powell’s military credentials that made him appealing to whites.
“Barack Obama’s got problems — in central Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky — that Colin Powell wouldn’t have,” Mr. Buchanan said. “Colin Powell did his duty in Vietnam, he’s a soldier, a general.” (Mr. Obama was too young for Vietnam.)
For decades, pollsters have found that one of the prejudices white Americans commonly hold about African-Americans is a belief that blacks are less patriotic, despite serving in the armed forces in greater proportion than their share of the population.
Ms. Rice, who grew up in segregated Birmingham, sounded as if she were refuting that very prejudice when she was asked for her reaction to Mr. Obama’s race speech.
“What I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn’t love and have faith in them, and that’s our legacy,” she told The Washington Times editorial board.
A rising generation of black leaders has opened up new possibilities. But so have the increasing levels of white tolerance. What is impossible to know, today, is how far that tolerance will extend.
For instance, Mr. Patterson said research consistently showed that roughly one in five whites continues to hold racist views. Indeed, a poll by the Pew Research Center in March found that 20 percent of white Democrats over the age of 44 found interracial dating unacceptable; only 3 percent of white Democrats under 44 felt that way.
Mr. Buchanan said Mr. Obama’s monolithic support among blacks was likely to stoke such white animosity.
“There’s a sense among some folks that if African-Americans are voting 90 percent for ‘one of us;’ then you’re going to vote for ‘one of us,’ ” he said. When Norm Kagan, a white 62-year-old supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s, was asked in St. Paul, Minn., if white voters in the state would support a black man, he immediately raised the specter of crime, as if the mere mention of blacks brought it to mind. “We’ve all had our problems,” he said. “Every now and then someone gets mugged or robbed. The most economically challenged — which are mostly black — are most often the criminals and not to be trusted.”
Some Republicans have used such associations to defeat Democrats. But political analysts point to signs that the culture-war tactics are losing steam. They note the Republican loss in 2006 of both houses of Congress, and the recent Democratic victories in traditionally Republican districts in special Congressional elections in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” about the G.O.P.’s political strategy since the 1960’s, said many of the issues like crime that allowed Republicans to divide and conquer no longer exist.
One of the biggest issues this year is the economic downturn. Shared distress may trump racial divisions, he said.
Democrats shouldn’t think that things will always be the way they have been, said Mr. Perlstein, a liberal. “Change does happen,” he said. “And it happens overnight.”
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