Black Expectations & Democratic Realities
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. |
