Analyst-Progaganda

On the Absolute “Silliness” of “Analysis-Propaganda:”
If I have read or heard this question asked once, I have heard it asked at least one hundred times: “Can Barak Obama appeal to “White Voters,” particularly “working class white men?” The question is almost always answered as a rebuke: “No, of course not!” This is the answer the Clintons’ foster, and what they would have you and everyone else believe.

The question itself, and the statistical answer provided, has the clear implication that if Obama cannot prevail in this single segment of voters, somehow this disqualifies him as a successful candidate. By implication, this means that if he cannot carry a Democratic primary in West Virginia and Kentucky, he cannot win in November in the General Election. This is an argument that Hillary Clinton is making passionately after the West Virginia vote, and it will be a constant refrain among her supporters on the talk shows and in the media. This is what I call, “analysis-propaganda.”

On the average of national polls carried daily on Real Clear Politics, Barak Obama is currently close to 49 percent of the popular vote and approximately four and a half points ahead of Senator John McCain. If he runs this well in November, he will be the next President of the United States regardless of the answer to the very silly propaganda question posed above. Since Black voters are at best 14 to 16 percent of the voting electorate in 2008 (13 percent in a normal year), I would assume that this answers the question about White Voters better than anything else I can say. Obama cannot get from 14 to 16 percent up to 49 percent without White voters, and they are not all “wet behind the ears” White younger voters or “pointy headed” White intellectuals, as the Clinton proponents suggest.

In order to be elected, Barak Obama must put together an electoral coalition that exceeds anything John McCain can muster. He is absolutely not required to include a majority of any particular group to achieve that objective. The notion that his failure to appeal to a particular group is necessarily fatal to his goal is pure propaganda almost always put into the market by an “analyst” who has some ties to one of the other candidates.

The Painful Realignment of Poorly Educated Whites and Blacks:
The Democratic Party does have a problem, and it has had this problem for a long time. Barak Obama did not cause the problem, but his skin color and values are the triggers for the emergence of the problem to the front ranks of Democratic and national politics. The problem is this: the single segment of Americans most threatened by the upward mobility of African Americans is, and has been, the less well educated Whites, particular the males who compete with Blacks in the job market. Every poll on race for the past 50 years has shown the same pattern of findings. It isn’t new at all, but what is new is the emergence of a Black presidential candidate within the Democratic Party who actually has a chance to win.

Both of these voting segments, Blacks and working class Whites have been a part of the Democratic Party since the Great Depression, in the coalition forged by Roosevelt. The first large break with the pattern was the schism that emerged in the South after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Blacks registered and started participating in politics for the first time in the old South, lower income and less well educated Whites began a migration away from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party all over the South. Basically, the poorer and less well educated White voters deserted the Democratic Party in the South, leaving a coalition of newly enfranchised Black voters and better educated and more affluent Whites, who were not threatened so much by Black upward mobility. The solidly Democratic South became the solidly Republican South in many areas, where Whites were still a majority. The Republicans have worked this constitutency with the symbolic issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with the economic welfare of working class Whites -- gun control, patriotism, religious appeals, abortion, gay rights, and the like, the so-called "wedge issues" that are powerful enough to get voters to vote for people who do not represent their economic interests at all.

The problem now, of course, is that the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama has opened this wound in the Democratic Party again, but this time in the older industrialized states of the North. When Obama captured more than 90 percent of Black voters, Clinton needed to find her support among the remaining elements in the party, and she focused her campaign directly at older White voters, particularly women, working class and poorer Whites, and Hispanics, which is another group that has had tensions with African Americans for much the same reason. West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan typify this mixture. However, Obama is still leading in the polls of Democrats and winning within the Democratic Party as a whole, despite the fact that he is not winning within every particular bloc. As of today, he is running five to seven percentage points better than Clinton among all Democrats nationwide.

Winning is Not About Appealing to Everyone:
Looking to the November election, Obama is currently running ahead of John McCain, although you would not know it when you listen to the partisan pundits who occupy the talking heads positions on television, or, in fact, to Hillary Clinton.

How can he possibly be ahead, you say, when he is losing among less well educated White males, whom some really ridiculous “analyst” declares emphatically is the key to the election? Ignore these idiots! Just ignore their silliness! They are mostly propagandists hiding in analysts clothing, hired by television more for their connections than their wisdom and serving their preferred candidate or party with questions that serve their “interests,” and certainly not yours.

Obama is putting together a new coalition, and that new coalition is likely to become the Democratic Party of the future and it will be significantly different from the Democratic Party of the Past. You might not like the composition of that coalition, and that is certainly “fair”, but it is a coalition that is clearly large enough to put him in the lead, and even keep him there all the way to end. His coalition includes African Americans, better educated Whites, young and old, males and females, and middle class voters who are royally tired of the old politics, the ugly strategies and tactics of Carl Rove and Company and the pure lunacy of the fiscal and war policies of the Bush Administration. Obama also runs well among voters without partisan affiliations – the so-called “independents” -- and voters who think of themselves as Republican who are disaffected with the policies of the Bush Administration. There will be many more Whites in this Coalition than there will be Blacks, and their voters are certainly as important and consequential as the voters of working class Whiles in the industrial North.

There are enough of these voters, and they are motivated sufficiently, to give Obama and his campaign all of the money and voters they will ever need to swamp the Republican war machine – and the Republicans know it. There are enough of these voters to win, clearly, so don’t worry too much when one of the learned idiots on television tries to sell you on the latest “soccer Mom” theory of voting and coalition building. West Virginia and Kentucky Democrats are not America as a whole, and Obama is still in the lead without them. Working class White voters are certainly an important voting bloc, but Obama is able to muster a majority of all voters without a majority in this particular segment.

In the end, the “Obama coalition” will be a “new coalition” that is demographically somewhat different from the current composition of the Democratic Party. When the election is over in November, there are going to be some new Blue States that were not in the Democratic camp in previous elections, and there will be enough of these Blue States to win if Obama continues to run with the national polling numbers that he currently enjoys. No presidential candidate in history has led in the popular vote nationwide by four to five points – Obama’s current lead -- and lost the national election.

Nonpartisan “analysts” cannot today foresee all of the implications of the emergence of such a coalition, but if it is successful in winning the White House in November, the implications are likely to persist, to the detriment of the Republican Party, for a long time to come. When one political party wins a clear majority of the next generation of voters, as Roosevelt did in the 1932 through 1936 elections and Reagan did from 1980 through 1984, the other political party will have troubles up and down the line in American politics, and for decades.

This is what Barak Obama is threatening to do in 2008, and it thoroughly frightening to the virulent “right wing” in American politics. They will use every weapon, however ugly, at their disposal – lies, half truths, guilt by association, distortions of the record, and so on -- so you had better get ready for a fight. In doing so, of course, they will evoke Jesus leading them into battle and sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” the way Bush did while leading America on his “personal crusade” into Iraq. When you have “God” behind your every act, all is forgiven in his name. Isn’t that what Osama bin Laden says about Allah?

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black