Clinton: Channeling George Wallace?
(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
Can Obama win enough ‘white’ votes?
What happened
Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, in an interview with USA Today, argued that she has a “much broader base to build a coalition on” than her Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Obama’s “support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again,” she said, citing an AP poll. “These are the people you have to win if you’re a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election,” she added. “Everybody knows that.” (USA Today)
What the commentators said
Clinton is starting to sound “like a reincarnation of the late George Wallace,” said Joe Conason in Salon. Talking about “ethnic and racial voting preferences” is fair and in fact “utterly mundane” in U.S. politics, but her comments apparently equating “hard-working Americans” with “white” Americans “crossed a bright white line” that earlier “clumsy” remarks about race didn’t. The “tragedy” is that neither Clinton nor her husband “carries even the slightest racial animus.” Her argument may well be correct “on the merits,” but when she channels “old Dixie demagogues like Wallace,” she undermines all she and Bill have done to combat the “essential evil of racism.”
Her argument is “debatable at best,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post (free registration). But as a rationale for Democratic superdelegates to crown her as the rightful nominee, “it’s a slap in the face to the party’s most loyal constituency—African Americans.” She’s saying that poorer white Democrats are “irredeemably racist,” and will never vote for a black Democratic nominee “running on Democratic principles against a self-described conservative Republican.” Clinton’s “sin isn’t racism, it’s arrogance,” and if Obama doesn’t win, it won’t be due to racism so much as the “wedge” Clinton’s driving into the Democratic coalition.
Clinton’s comments may be “politically incorrect,” but they’re “also patently true,” said Patrick Buchanan in RealClearPolitics. Let’s call the voters in question “Hillary Democrats—a.k.a. the ex-Reagan Democrats who did not vote for Obama and may defect to John McCain.” The only two Democratic presidents in the past 40 years, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, won “only after connecting with these folks.” To get elected, Obama needs to win them over, too; the challenge for McCain is to keep a “goodly slice” of them.
Actually, Clinton lost the “white male vote” in 1996, by a 49 percent to 38 percent margin, said the blog No More Mister Nice Blog, but he still won 70 percent of the electoral votes. Al Gore lost white men by a much wider margin, but still won the popular vote “by half a million.” So the notion that “Democrats had Joe Sixpack in their back pockets until that snooty arugula-eater Barack Obama came along” is a “myth,” as is Clinton’s argument that “they suffer crushing defeats when bowlers and boilermaker-drinkers aren’t on board.”
Her logic is suspect, but she’s making “a common argument and not an offensive one,” said Matthew Yglesias in The Atlantic. And “from just a tactical posture,” Obama supporters should avoid getting “super snarky and indignant” about any of Clinton’s comments. Obama’s challenge now is not to “crush Hillary Clinton,” it’s to win over as many of the “people who find this sort of argument plausible” as he can.
