Race Loses

Race a factor?

Obama did not win a majority of white voters; no Democrat has since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he ran equal to the last three Democratic candidates for president among white voters, and even slightly better than the party's 2004 nominee, according to an Edison/Mitofsky exit poll conducted for a consortium of TV networks and the Associated Press.

The prejudice against John Kerry was stronger than it was against Barack??? Or maybe, race was simply not a factor.

Race proved to be no discernible handicap, even among the small-town, working-class whites who were considered most resistant to the black political newcomer from Chicago.

The force propelling Obama was clear: a troubled economy that had gone from shaky in the spring and summer to frightening in the fall. But in choosing an African American as the best person to lead in a time of crisis, the nation's voters have broken a number of long-held truths about the hold of race on the country.

Nutty E's

As much as they respect brains and sophistication, liberals find theirs largely inoperative when it comes to Barack. Here's the latest bit of email I've received purporting to offer profound insights. (The email I received is in blue, my responses are in black):

A question of perspective :

Obama/Biden vs McCain/Palin, what if things were switched around?..... think about it. Would the country's collective point of view be different? Could racism be the culprit?

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

Considering he's black, and this would reinforce negative perceptions of being black, he would surely face a different standard. But you have to take the good with the bad - Barack wouldn't be the Democratic nominee if he wasn't black.

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

That would be a nice addition to his naval academy training.

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

One of the only justifications for his candidacy would be gone.

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?

If it had occurred decades ago, no one would care, and Barack would defend himself from any mention of it by claiming that his failed marriage isn't what's going to bring the American people jobs and a prosperous economy. But, of course, the vast majority of voters would not be aware of the fact, because the pro-Obama media wouldn't write about it. (see next post down.)

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe
disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?

See above.

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while
he was still married?

See above.

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain
killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

See above.

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

She wouldn't be hated by liberals who judge her harshly for being blond, rich and tacky. Those negative attributes would be viewed as insignificant compared to her being in possession of the liberal certificate of approval known as a Harvard diploma.

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five?
(The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption
in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings
and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

Obama has many worse things in his recent past and no one seems to care, so there's no reason to think a 20 year old scandal would matter. Hope and Change is all that matters.

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

No one would vote for Barack - he would have lost his ability to differentiate himself.

What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?

See above.

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included
discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

He'd be up by 30%, as he'd have some experience that people could respect.

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many
occasions, a serious anger management problem?

With his lack of any other achievement in his short career, this might loom large. If he had McCain's 50+ years of professional experience, no one would care, and again, the media wouldn't write about it.

What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?

They'd be rich.

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

Folks would be confused, but impressed at yet another example of Barack's willingness to do anything to win.

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality,
do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes
positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in
another when there is a color difference.

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John McCain:
United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - gener al study
University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in
the land as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.
Given that John McCain's education was completed around the time Barack was born, there are other things to judge him by, so education appropriately takes a back seat to experience. Since Barack lacks any qualifications for the presidency, his educational experience is vital.

Given that Joe Biden appears to suffer mental problems and has been on the wrong side of virtually every important vote during his lifelong senate career, Sarah looks awfully strong by comparison.

I've got a question for them:

• If John McCain had 8 years in the state senate as his single largest and longest career achievement, had little to show for his time there, and had built his career by cavorting with racists, black separatists, former terrorists and other scummy people, would he have been able to get this far?
• If Barack were not black, would he have been able to get the Democratic nomination?

Now there are some important questions for liberals to ponder. But they won't.
You make the call.

The Polls

Today's tallys - from the polls we pay the most attention to. Rasmussen stays at 8% for the second day, Gallup stays at 5%, and Zogby drops to 5%, with a 3 point lead for Barack in yesterday's polling alone (the 5% number comes from tabulating the last 3 days.)

Rasmussen Reports 10/23 - 10/25 3000 LV 2.0 52 44 Obama +8
Gallup (Traditional)* 10/23 - 10/25 2448 LV 2.0 50 45 Obama +5
Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby 10/23 - 10/25 1203 LV 2.9 49 44 Obama +5

Zogby - 5%

On Thursday, the Zogby poll showed Barack up 12 points. It was down to 10%, then 9%, for the next couple of days. Today's number? A 5 point race.

"I have alluded before to this strange, magnetic pull that brings Obama down to 48% or 49%, a danger zone for him. McCain's gains are among white voters, where he now leads by 12 points, and with men, where he again has a healthy lead. There is still a lot of campaign to go. A lot of campaign to go." - John Zogby

Rasmussen shows Barack up 8% again today... and yesterday's Gallup has it a7% game.

"Things are trending back for McCain. His numbers are rising and Obama's are dropping on a daily basis. There seems to be a direct correlation between this and McCain talking about the economy," pollster John Zogby said.

Democrats like to make elections about class warfare, and they've succeeded.

Obama's lead among voters making less than $35,000 per year remains substantial at a little over 70 percent. But McCain, who had previously scored well only with the highest income brackets, now holds slight leads among voters in all income groups starting at $35,000 and above.

"You've got to think that it is tax-and-spend that concerns them. Is McCain starting to connect with the middle class?" Zogby said.

Barack seems to be losing ground with the ladies.

Obama still had solid, if slightly diminished, leads among two important groups which could play pivotal roles in the November 4 election. Among independents he had a 14 point lead, down from a peak of 29 points. Women also still backed Obama by a 14-point margin, down from 20 points late last week.

McCain, who once had a 4-point deficit among male voters, now has a 4-point lead at 48-44 percent. And whites back McCain by a 12-point margin, up from 6 points on Friday.

What if He Doesn't?

Barack was ordained by the media months ago. All this election stuff is just a formality.

Election Day is less than two weeks away, and Chicago could be home to the biggest political party in the country. Construction is underway for a massive stage in Grant Park where Barack Obama could declare victory on election night.

Americans have been convinced, as was the intention, that an Obama victory is unavoidable.

No one really knows how many people will come to the lakefront's Grant Park on Nov. 4. Weather will likely play a role. It was warm and sunny a few days ago in St. Louis when Barack Obama drew an estimated 100,000 to the banks of the Mississippi River.

While Americans are convinced of Barack's inevitability, the ruling class is not.

Police departments in cities across the country are beefing up their ranks for Election Day, preparing for possible civil unrest and riots after the historic presidential contest.

Civil unrest? They must mean if Barack loses.

Public safety officials said in interviews with The Hill that the election, which will end with either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice president, demanded a stronger police presence.

No one's going to be rioting over Sarah, are they?

The Oakland police last faced big riots in 2003 when the Raiders lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Super Bowl. Officials are bracing themselves in case residents of Oakland take Obama’s loss badly.

The suggestion seems to be that voters will be irate, convinced that there's been a theft, if Obama doesn't ascend to the thrown as promised. Which, judging from the way the race is portrayed in the media, would be a reasonable response.

Governor Dumb

Barack had a couple of tough weeks after his convention ended. He got a four point bounce from his convention, but McCain's bounce about doubled that, putting McCain into a small lead.

Mature Democrats would realize the numbers will be doing a lot of moving around over the next several weeks. Normal Democrats will blame rrrrrraaaaaaaccccccceeee!!!, their favorite demon, when things aren't going Barack's way.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius publicly considered the possibility that Sen. Barack Obama’s race might be a factor in this year’s presidential election during an appearance here Tuesday.

Of course it will be a factor.

“Have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African-American?” Sebelius asked in response to a question about why the election is so close. “That may be a factor. All the code language, all that doesn’t show up in the polls. And that may be a factor for some people.”

I suspect that race plays the same role for Barack that religion did for Romney, being a bald, Italian New Yorker did for Rudy, or being old does for McCain. People are biased.

The remark, delivered in the governor’s low key, folksy, out-from-behind-the-podium style, raised a couple chuckles but few eyebrows in the downtown Iowa City crowd, but Republicans took offense and responded in short order.

The impact of these biases can be minimized, or exaggerated, by the behavior of the candidate. Having partnerships with people like the Reverends Pfleger and Wright is the sort of thing that exacerbates concerns over whether one's otherness is a signal of a candidate whose views aren't mainstream.

“Governor Sebelius’s remarks in Iowa City today are hurtful and divisive at best,” said Republican Party of Iowa Executive Director Caleb Hunter in a press release. “With less than 50 days to go, Democrats will continue to try and change the focus away from the issues that will decide this election.”

One of the problems Democrats have is they've been sucking on the teet of the racial divide for so long that they can't separate fact from fiction any more.

The rest of Sebelius’ remarks in Iowa City stuck closely to the Obama campaign’s talking points.

The more Dems talk about race, the more Americans will grow concerned that being black might be Barack's most important attribute. In which case, race really will be a factor. Which is why Democrats with any brains never mention race.

Blind Racism?

The Governor of New York says that Sarah Palin was turning "community organizer" into racist code at the GOP convention.

"So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities," she said at the convention.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words "community organizer" as Republican code for "black".

Whether you agree with this attempt to use the race shield so generously on Barack's behalf or not, you have to know that this is not good for Barack.

"I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people's progress with a subtle reference to their race," he said.

Barack doesn't want to be viewed as the black candidate, and if he's being defended from attacks on his inexperience with charges of racism, you make him into another Al Sharpton in the eyes of mainstream voters.

But the McCain/Palin campaign quickly fired back in a statement, saying: "It is disappointing that Governor Paterson would launch accusations of racism. … Governor Palin's remarks about Barack Obama's work as a community organizer was in response to the Obama campaign's belittling of her executive experience."

Barack admits he was talking about race

Barack now admits the obvious, as his campaign manager did before him, that he was referring to race when he said:

So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, `he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name,' you know, `he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.'

The powerful part of the statement has been ignored. It's the "what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," part that makes this explosive when combined with the issue of race.

"I am black!" he is shouting out - "You better watch out, because the racist Republicans are coming to get me!"

"I'm young. I'm new to the national scene," Obama said. "My name is Barack Obama. I am African-American. I was born in Hawaii. I spent time in Indonesia. I do not have the typical biography of a presidential candidate. What that means is that I'm sort of unfamiliar and people are still trying to get a fix on who I am."

This is Barack being cute on race - he wants to use it to his advantage by notifying voters of the danger, but he also wants to be the 'post-racial' candidate. If Barack is going to use race as a shield in this election, isn't it time to let go of the claims that he is transcendent?

Meanwhile, the mere inclusion of a blond female in a McCain ad on Barack is designed to stoke the latent racial angst in Americans, we're told, maliciously injecting race into the campaign.

Democrats accused McCain of cynically turning things on their head; by crying foul, they claimed, McCain managed to put race front and center just as he was stepping up his personal attacks on Obama.

Is Barack just trying to keep the minority vote stoked, or does this also work to create a 60's style paradigm in the election that keeps his suburban liberal affluent voters motivated?

Obama benefited in the Democratic presidential primary from anger stirred by suggestions that his rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, and her surrogates were using race to appeal to white voters. Although Obama never explicitly made that case -- and usually works to downplay his ethnicity -- he is thought to be counting on strong black support in November to win battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, and to put Republican-leaning states such as North Carolina and perhaps even Georgia into play.

Injecting Race

The McCain campaign doesn't seem to have noticed that when Barack made his comments again yesterday injecting race into the campaign (again), he was again talking like he was already president.

Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face.
So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, `he's not
patriotic enough, he's got a funny name,' you know, `he doesn't look like all
those other presidents on the dollar bills.'

Was Barack intending to inject race? David Axelrod says no, but then admits that the statement does refer to Barack being "African American." Try to make sense out of this!

Race Card

McCain has nailed Obama, thankfully, for playing the race card - again.

The negative twist in the campaign for the November 4 election was prompted by a McCain television advertisement on Wednesday that called Obama a celebrity akin to star-crossed U.S. personalities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

In response, Obama said McCain was trying to scare voters away from him by pointing out he had "a funny name, and he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills."

There was nothing in the ad that did anything of the sort - it simply questioned whether the man with no experience is prepared for the job of the Presidency.

"Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong," McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a written statement.

Mostly, it's just manipulative.

McCain agreed with Davis, telling reporters he was "very disappointed" that Obama had used the race card.

"Race will not have any role in my campaign, nor is there any place for it. I'm disappointed that he's used it."

Thank you, McCain, for getting tough.

Short Bounce

Barack's bounce appears to be fading already. Yesterday, he had a 5 point lead from Rasmussen and a 9 point lead from Gallup, but today offers a different picture.

Gallup has dropped, but just one point, to an 8% lead for Barack. But Rasmussen goes back to 3% for Obama.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that Barack Obama’s Berlin bounce is fading. Obama now attracts 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 42%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 48% and McCain 45%. Both Obama and McCain are viewed favorably by 56% of voters.

But here's the most remarkable news. Another Gallup poll, done for USA Today, shows McCain in the lead!!!

Republican presidential candidate John McCain moved from being behind by 6 points among "likely" voters a month ago to a 4-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama among that group in the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. McCain still trails slightly among the broader universe of "registered" voters. By both measures, the race is tight.

That's a 10 point swing in just a month - and, these numbers were collected Friday thru Sunday, when Barack was at the peak of his Overseas Buzz. Which puts Barack into very tight territory in the Real Clear Politics average of current polls.

With today's Rasmussen and Gallup tracking both ticking down for Obama (-2 and -1, respectively) and a new Dem Corps poll showing Obama up five, the new RCP National Average has Obama's lead over McCain dipping to 3.2%.