McCain’s Hidden Advantage
No matter what Obama does or what issue he takes, many voters may vote purely on demographic and racial terms.
If there was any surprise in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, it was that recent events had virtually no effect on the result. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton could have stayed home for the past month and a half and the outcome would have been essentially the same. Women and older voters, for the
most part, would have come out for Clinton; blacks, young people and the highly educated elite would have backed Obama. And Clinton would have ended up with a decisive victory unlikely to halt her opponent's march toward the nomination.
That may be astonishing to those who expected the querulous campaign and the candidates' missteps—Clinton's tale of evading snipers in Bosnia and Obama's embarrassing description of "bitter" voters—to alter the dynamic of the race. Even the widely criticized remarks of Obama's former pastor (who suggested, among other things, that American policy may have been partially responsible for the September 11 attack) had little measurable impact on voter behavior. As far as Gallup can tell, the effect of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s inflammatory language "died after a couple of days," said Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup poll.
This is good news for Obama—at least in the short term—because it means that there is little he can do to screw things up. If the campaign is largely a matter of demographics, it will be virtually impossible for Clinton to get 70 percent of all remaining delegates—which is what Obama campaign manager David Plouffe believes she will need in order to deny his man the nomination.
But what is good for Obama now might be fatal later. Demographics don't necessarily favor him, or any Democrat, in the general election. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nom-ination, racially polarized voting patterns will remain a reality, argues Vincent Hutchings, associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan. If voters behave this year as they have in the recent past, upwards of 55 percent of whites will vote for the Republican candidate and somewhere upwards of 85 percent of blacks will vote for the Democrat. In 2000, Al Gore won an estimated 92 percent of the black votes. Hutchings doubts Obama could do any better (though he may be able to get more blacks and also more young people to actually turn out to vote).
The unknown factor with Obama is how his race will affect the vote overall. Some 18 percent of voters in the Pennsylvania primary told pollsters that race was an important factor in deciding their vote. And of the 12 percent of whites who said race mattered, three fourths voted for Clinton. Obama stands to lose a substantial share of those votes in the general election. In an analysis of the Pennsylvania results, Gary Langer, ABC's director of polling, points out that only 54 percent of those white Democrats who said race was important would support Obama instead of John McCain. The rest said they would either vote for McCain—or not at all. Race, Langer notes, operated in a fundamentally different way than gender. Voters who said the gender of the candidate was important seemed much less likely to choose their gender preference over their party.
Though the percentage of voters who say race is important is relatively small, those voters (whose numbers may well be understated in the polls) could be the margin of victory in a close election—especially since the percentage will likely be higher in the general election than in the Democratic primary. The American electorate, taken as a whole, is not as racially liberal as Democratic primary voters.
It is not just Obama's race that matters, but also his racial associations. "White Americans are, on balance, racially moderate to conservative," notes Hutchings. To the extent Obama appears to be something other than that, he loses white votes. That reality makes it all but inevitable that Republican strategists will attempt to resurrect the controversy surrounding Obama's former pastor as a way of removing Obama from the American mainstream and alienating him from those whites (working class and older voters among them) who have not been particularly enthusiastic about his candidacy to begin with.
Ed Sarpolus, a pollster who works for the Michigan Educational Association, says he believes Obama's difficulties with working-class whites may have little to do with race. "I don't think we are at a point where we can measure the racial impact," he says. The more pressing potential issue, as Sarpolus sees it, is that Obama lacks a compelling "working-class message."
At this stage, despite increased voter turnout, most Americans are not paying much attention to political messages. The average voter is simply "not tuned in to primaries," observes Hutchings. Also, as Clinton and Obama both acknowledge, their messages are not so very different. Given that, it's hardly remarkable that demographics are paramount. Other than the candidates' posturing, squabbling and supposed gaffes, there is little else for even serious-minded voters to focus on.
That will not be so in the fall. At that point (whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be), voters will face a choice between fundamentally different approaches to some of the most difficult challenges, both domestic and international, that America has faced in a generation. That election is too important to be decided primarily on the basis of (inherently superficial) demographic factors—not that they will ever cease to matter. "Demographics are always a backdrop in American politics," Hutchings points out. But one thing that has made this season so exciting is the possibility of change. For even as the primaries have confirmed the truth of Hutchings's observation, they have also fueled the hope that we are capable of embracing a not-so-distant future where that need not be the case. To lose that hope would be tragic, not just for Obama, but for America.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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