Letters to the Editor
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Of course the flipside of that is, so what?
African Americans are the #2 largest minority.
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The Black Vote Was Never Hers to Lose
Hillary is focusing on the "bitter" whites because their numbers are greater, and because the Clinton's have been nothing but savvy politically and realized that the reverse Bradley effect is inevitable--ie at the end of the day, as a result of ethnic pride or identity politics or racism, the preponderance of African Americans were more likely to vote for Obama than not. Just as Oprah became politically active suddenly and "coincidentally" the first time in her career when a viable black candidate was running for President, other African Americans are also jumping aboard Obama's bandwagon. This should not be surprising or take a college professor to figure out.
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rphillips111
Congratulations! You win the award for Most Batshit Crazy Post of the Day!
wow dude, just wow.
you quite literally compared Obama to the Communists AND the Fascists. Of course someone who has been around politics as long as you have doesn't need to be reminded that the Communists and the Fascists are on opposite ends of the spectrum so any comparisons between Obama and both those ideologies is absurd. Not to mention the fact that he's...ahem...running for president, not staging an October Revolution or a Beer Hall Putsch!
my word rphillips111, you really are the dumbest person I've ever read.
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Clinton's mistake? Or a deliberate gamble?
... the Clinton campaign signaled that if they were going to lose the black vote, they might as well turn it into an advantage with other elements in the Democratic coalition, notably white working-class voters.
Yes, they certainly did that.
Schaller offers an excellent analysis of the Clinton campaign, and his development of a scenario in which Clinton had pursued black voters more devotedly is very interesting, but he fails, or is perhaps too polite, to cover two obvious factors.
One is the fallout to the rest of her campaign strategy if she had pursued black voters more determinedly. Many of Clinton's white rural working-class supporters will undoubtedly cheerfully switch their support to Obama if he wins the nomination. But they support her now because she's "more like them," and let's be frank here — they're not referring to her small-town roots.
How much of this support would Clinton have lost if she had been more aggressively, and openly, engaged with African Americans? We don't necessarily know, but Clinton's assumption seems to have been that it would have been more than she would have gained, and maybe she's right. Schaller doesn't even try to delve into that aspect of her campaign strategy.
The other obvious factor was maybe not so obvious at first, but has become increasingly so since Super Tuesday — Clinton's plan for the primary has been simply to run her national campaign.
Perhaps she figured so much on sweeping the primary that she never bothered to come up with a plan for fighting it out, and when forced by Obama into a protracted campaign just pulled out her autumn plan against the GOP and figured it would do the trick.
Or maybe she intentionally chose that course as an appeal to the party leadership (and the superdelegates) so she could point to how well she had executed it and say, "Ignore the actual results, see how I would have nailed this if it had been for electoral votes instead of primary delegates?" (The fact that many Clinton supporters have been making this argument lately, despite its obvious fallacies, suggests that at the very least it's become a campaign talking point, but that doesn't mean it was always the idea.)
In any event, whether a failure of imagination or a deliberate gamble, it seems clear that since Clinton's national campaign plan didn't involve a strong direct appeal to black voters, neither does her plan for the primaries.
It doesn't make her a racist, nor was it even necessarily a mistake. As much as I like Schaller's analysis, Clinton is the one out there trying to win, and maybe she realized that this was the only way she could do as well as she has.
Or maybe she did just make a mistake. If not — if her assumptions about race dynamics in the Democratic party are actually true — then the party has a lot of work yet to do before it can win decisively in November.
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@ Electro
I'm sure you're fatigued as speak dismissively only out of frustration, but this very dismissive attitude is the ultimate cause of Clinton's lose of not only AA voters but many other "small" groups as well. Perhaps if HRC had strategized to attract these less important constituencies rather than only approaching the "big states" she wouldn't be where she is now, n'est ce pas?
Remember: An ocean begins with a single drop of water.
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@rphillips
Come now, Mr. Rove.
Don't you have more right-wing smear campaigns to coordinate, and more "in-depth" analysis to do for your Fox gig?
How could you have time to spend hanging around at Salon, writing under a fake name? After all, you've got a lot of important duties on your plate. You've got a candidate to try to get elected, dirty tricks to conduct, and Communism, Fascism, and Islam to destroy! Calgon, take you away!!!!
Seriously -- do you really have time to continue to spend hanging out on blogs, pretending you're clueless and spewing right-wing talking points, trying to make sure Hillary's the nominee?
Come on, there are countries to invade, and backroom deals to benefit Halliburton to be made!!!!
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Race-baiting and her lies ....
Had it not been for the race-baiting she and her husband did two months ago, she would still have my support. There's enough racism in world.
I don't like the subliminal messages the Clintons planted in the minds of the American public.
What is clear to me is, the Clintons will do anything to "win".
I guess that's a good quality for a President to have ...
UNFETTERD RUTHLESSNESS.
I can be ruthless too, and vote for McCain.
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It's all racially driven for blacks to back Obama
All these talks of Hillary's losing the block of black vote is her own undoing is ludicrous. Before the result of Iowa primary came out, African Americans doubted if one of their own could ever be favored by the whites. Immediately after that, for the first time in the history of this nation, a truly viable black candidate has become highly viable and electable with the unanticipated support of white voters. Then came the frenzy to defect from overwhelmingly supporting Hillary to becoming solid block of Obama backers. It's all about identifying one candidate through an emotionally-driven perspective along racial line. What Obama has done for the black community is peanut compared to what the Clintons have achieved over the last 18 years. This distorted, misguided and misplaced loyalty towards Obama by over 90% of African-Americans because of his skin color show how the black community is so eager to reverse the pain and humiliation by flocking to one of their own and hoping to push him to the top never mind how much Obama has done for them or if he is genuinely a white man in disguise of a black. It's a vast and powerful political capital to claim to be black or white whenever and wherever it fits. The truth is, no matter what the Clintons say or do over the course of this campaign, these perfidious and naive African Americans will switch to Obama in droves anyway, just as those self-professed intellectuals and gullible college kids did over their overrated idealism and elitism. So don't blame the Clintons for the black mutiny. The African-Americans have every right to choose side though I strongly disagree with them. What has Obama done to deserve their unreserved and overwhelming support beside his skin color?