Monday, June 25, 2012
As Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney in the polls
narrows, and his presumed fundraising advantage seems about to become a
disadvantage, it's alibi time for some of his backers.
His problem, they say, is that some voters don't like him
because he's black. Or they don't like his policies because they don't like
having a black president.
So, you see, if you don't like Obamacare, it's not
because it threatens to take away your health insurance, or to deny coverage
for some treatments. It's because you don't like black people.
This sort of thing seems to be getting more frequent, or
at least more open. As White House Dossier writer Keith Koffler notes, HBO host
Bill Maher accused Internet tyro Matt Drudge of being animated by racism
because he highlights anti-Obama stories.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked former San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown if House Chairman Darrell Issa's treatment of Attorney General
Eric Holder was "ethnic." Brown agreed, and Matthews said some
Republicans "talk down to the president and his friends."
There's an obvious problem with the racism alibi. Barack
Obama has run for president before, and he won. Voters in 2008 knew he was
black. Most of them voted for him. He carried 28 states and won 365 electoral
votes.
Nationwide, he won 53 percent of the popular vote. That
may not sound like a landslide, but it's a higher percentage than any
Democratic nominee except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon
Johnson.
Democratic national conventions have selected nominees 45
times since 1832. In seven cases, they won more than 53 percent of the vote. In
37 cases, they won less.
That means President Obama won a larger percentage of the
vote than Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan,
Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and
(though you probably don't want to bring this up in conversation with him) Bill
Clinton.
Now it is true that you can go out in America and find
people who would just never vote for a black person. But it's a lot harder than
it was a generation or two ago, when most voters admitted to pollsters they
would never vote for a black president.
And you can probably find some people who usually vote
for Democrats but would not vote for a black Democrat. But not very many of
them, and they're likely to be pretty advanced in age, and so there are likely
fewer of them around than there were four years ago.
My own view is that such voters were more than
counterbalanced by voters who felt that, as an abstract proposition in the
light of our history, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black
president.
In 2008, Obama, who came to national attention by
decrying the polarization of Red-state and Blue-state America, had obvious
appeal to voters. I think there is a similar, and similarly unquantifiable,
factor working for Obama this year: Many voters feel, as an abstract
proposition, that it would be a bad thing for American voters to reject the
first black president.
Some conservatives complain that there is a double
standard, that whites who vote against Obama are accused of racial motives,
while blacks, 95 percent of whom voted for him, are not.
I think that's unfair. Members of an identifiable group
that has been in some way excluded from full recognition as citizens will
naturally tend to support a candidate who could be the first president from
that group. In 1960, Gallup reported that 78 percent of American Catholics
voted for John Kennedy.
American blacks have suffered exclusion and
discrimination more than any other group. And very large percentages of them
regularly vote for candidates who share Obama's views on issues.
What's remarkable about our politics in 2008 and today is
that most voters seem to be making their decisions based on their assessment of
the issues and the character of the candidates.
The fact that some have, at least for the moment, moved
away from supporting Obama to opposing him, or remain unsure, reflects not an
increasing racism, but the fact that we simply have more information than we
had four years ago.
Most of us are disappointed when our candidates don't
win. But that's no excuse for phony alibis.
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