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Paul R. Hollrah
Black Expectations & Democratic Realities
August 21, 2008
The
next seven days will no doubt be the most critical in Barack Obama’s
life...so critical, in fact, that he may want to bind and gag his wife;
the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; Father Pfleger; his former terrorist friends,
Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn; and everyone else who has damaged him by
speaking on his behalf, endorsing him, or standing at his side.
With John
McCain pulling five points ahead of Obama among likely voters, it
wouldn’t take much for a substantial number of super-delegates to turn
against him. After all, that’s why Democrats have super-delegates. They
play the same role for Democrats in the nominating process that the
Electoral College plays in the General Election. They’re there to
prevent really dumb things from happening: e.g. the nomination of a
naïve and inexperienced egomaniac who would do great and long-lasting
harm to the country.
And now
that Obama has given the Clintons the opening they wanted...the ability
to place Hillary’s name in nomination at the convention in Denver...he
could find himself going down to defeat as the super-delegates come to
the stark realization of what happens when their party nominates radical
left candidates. They’ll be remembering what happened when they
nominated Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry,
and they’ll be wondering if they want to bet on an inside straight for
the ninth time in forty years. (They won only one of those bets...Carter
in 1976...and then only because the electorate was telling Gerald Ford
that he had become president by accident and they weren’t about to
reward him with a full term.)
To say
that the daily tracking polls are useless, especially in the 2008
presidential campaign, would be an understatement. Why? Because of the
race issue. In case there are those who’ve been so self-absorbed that
they haven’t noticed, Barack Obama is black...a fact which he is only
too happy to point out.
The reason
that race takes on special importance in this election is precisely
because the black candidate in the race is a Democrat, not a Republican.
If the black candidate in the race were a Republican, race would not be
an issue. Not only was the Republican Party founded out of opposition to
slavery, it was a Republican president who freed the slaves; it was
Republicans who wrote and sponsored the 13th, 14th and15th Amendments,
outlawing slavery and giving blacks citizenship and the right to vote;
and it is Republicans who have been the most reliable supporters of
civil rights and equal opportunity for blacks in the past 150 years.
On the
other hand, as the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow and the Black
Codes, the party of the KKK, and the party of opposition to black
citizenship and black voting rights, the Democratic Party has always
been hyper-schizophrenic on the subject of race.
For
example, during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s the
most powerful constituency the Democratic Party had was organized labor,
and it was the rare Democrat who was willing to stand in the way of big
labor’s political and legislative agenda.
Thus, as
official segregation was declared unconstitutional and the Jim Crow laws
went out the window, the greatest danger faced by big labor was the
entrance of millions of black workers into the ranks of the building
trades and the industrial unions. Labor leaders were only too happy to
get behind New Frontier and Great Society welfare spending because, by
keeping blacks content and out of the union hiring halls, there would be
far less competition for jobs.
Like the
New Deal of the 1930s, the New Frontier and the Great Society of the
1960s were designed to buy off a major segment of the U.S. population
with social welfare spending, and it shall forever be to the shame of
African Americans that they took the bait.
It is just
one example of the inherent racism that has always existed within the
Democratic Party, and which is alive and well today...which brings us
back to the significance of daily tracking polls and exit polls.
In past
elections, exit polls have been a mixed blessing. Pollsters tell us
that, since their clients, the mainstream media, want to declare states
won or lost at the earliest possible time, exit polling must end a few
hours before the polls close. Consequently, those who vote late, say,
between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM, are not sampled at all. Others, such as
senior citizens and stay-at-home moms, who tend to vote early, are
oversampled in the exit polls, making exit polling a very inexact
science.
However,
with a black candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket, it is likely
that this year’s exit polls will be even less reliable in predicting the
final outcome than in previous elections. Why? Because, among white
working class Democrats, there is a major segment of voters who know
that it’s not nice to discriminate on the basis of race, but who find it
very difficult to vote for a black candidate. They will tell pollsters
who call that they intend to vote for Obama because they know that’s
what they’re expected to say, but what they do in the privacy of the
voting booth is an entirely different matter.
Barack
Obama has been able to raise expectations among African Americans that
he will be the next President of the United States, and they fully
expect white Democrats to make that happen. They expect conservatives
and Republicans to be in John McCain’s column, so when there is a
disappointing outcome on the evening of November 4th they’ll know
exactly who to blame.
They don’t
expect 10 or 15 percent of white working class Democrats to abandon
Obama in the privacy of the voting booth, but, given the magnitude of
his recent faux pas, no one should be surprised if that’s what
happens. They will not be happy with white Democrats who promise one
thing but do another, and it may be generations before the party can
recover from that failure. It’s all a matter of black expectations
versus Democratic realities. |
