The race excuse

Matt Bai:

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In the weeks leading up to his decision, as a flurry of new polls showed Mr. Obama and John McCain to be almost deadlocked, many Democrats and some members of the news media embraced a new article of faith: Lower-income white voters are resisting Mr. Obama’s candidacy principally because he is African-American. “Where he’s lagging is among white voters, and with older ones in particular," John Heilemann wrote in New York magazine this month. “Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black?”

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Once Mr. Biden’s name was announced, commentators were quick to note that not only does he bring the ticket a well-earned expertise on foreign affairs, but he also possesses an ability to relate to working-class white men. Mr. Biden’s coming-out speech in Springfield, Ill., was heavy on allusions to his Irish-Catholic roots in Scranton, Pa., and to the “cops and firefighters, the teachers and the line workers” with whom he grew up.

No doubt the unpretentious, politically incorrect Mr. Biden will make a strong impression on white, working-class voters. The only hitch in this plan is that there’s plenty of reason to think that Mr. Obama’s race is not the insurmountable detriment to his candidacy that a lot of anxious observers believe it is.

The theory that race is holding back Mr. Obama’s candidacy rests on a pretty simple premise. Adherents argue that the Democratic candidate ought to be effortlessly leading by double digits in the polls at this point — and that his failure to do so can only be explained by latent racism among older voters.

After all, this thinking goes, the Republican president suffers from abysmal approval ratings, and even half-witted voters should be able to see that Mr. Obama is a superior candidate to Mr. McCain, were their views not clouded by race.

These are flawed assumptions, however. While it’s entirely possible that Mr. Obama’s race is costing him some support, it’s also true that the electorate that voted in the last two presidential elections was almost symmetrically divided between the two parties. It would defy the laws of politics if, at this early stage of the campaign, moderate Republicans and conservative independents were to reject Mr. McCain (a candidate many of them preferred back in 2000) simply because they don’t like George W. Bush.

Second, Mr. Obama faces genuine obstacles that are more salient than skin color. By any historical measure, he has remarkably little governing experience and almost none in foreign policy. And he represents not only a racial milestone in American life, but also a stark generational shift. It’s hard to extricate these things from Obama’s blackness. (If older white voters recoiled at Mr. Obama when he exchanged a fist-bump with his wife, were they reacting to his youth or to his race?) There are legitimate reasons that some older white voters might reserve judgment on Mr. Obama without being closet racists.

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Ever since 2000, a lot of so-called progressives have proudly displayed a healthy contempt for less-educated white voters who cast ballots in defiance of their “economic self-interest,” as Thomas Frank argued in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (The widespread acceptance of Mr. Frank’s thesis is how John Kerry largely escaped the scorn that is ritually visited upon losing Democratic presidential nominees; the members of his party directed their exasperation at the voters instead.) But surely caricaturing a large subset of voters as ignorant has made those voters even less inclined to pull the lever for the Democrats this time around. All this talk about racism isn’t likely to help.

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Bai is correct in saying that race is not Obama's main problem, if it is a problem at all. I could care less about his fist bump. I recognized is as a sign of affection between the couple an not as some political symbol.

There are three main reasons why voters should reject Obama and they have nothing to do with race and they apply to Biden too.

First they were both wrong on the surge. Their solutions would have been disastrous for Iraq and the US. Biden only adds to Obama's problem on this issue because of his support for the dissolution of Iraq into three countries. The only thing that proposal did was unify Iraqis in opposition to it. Many commentators are still misreading the dissatisfaction with the war and confusing that dissatisfaction with a desire to lose which only a third of voters support. If the polls had asked the honest question of do you want to lose in Iraq, they would have gotten a much different answer.

Second, Obama and the Democrats are on the wrong side of the voters on the energy issue. Their opposition to drilling is supported by only 25 percent of the voters. Given that , the real mystery is why he has as much support as he does and the likely answer is that some voters still do not understand his position. This is a huge danger for the Democrats because they want the election to be about the economy, but most voters recognize the biggest problem with the economy is high energy prices and they also recognize that the Democrats not only want high energy prices, they have been strangling the production of energy in all forms for decades.

Third, Obama and the Democrats are wrong on taxes. In the name of fairness they want to raise taxes on the most productive which robs the country of investments by those people. It also lowers the revenue to the treasury. Polls show that two thirds of the country favor a low tax small government approach. The GOP delivered only half that and actually grew the size of government. The Democrats are wrong on both sides and the Republicans appear to have learned their lesson. This gives them an opportunity to get those votes back.

Another reason that includes all of the big three is that the Democrats have been in charge of Congress for almost two years and have not been able to do anything with it.

If Democrats want to call people who disagree with them on those three issues racist, they deserve to lose.