If you want to assume the Clintons are devious, five-steps-ahead
political operators — and, really, why not assume? — it seems
somehow important that their lower-level allies are so handy with
uncomfortable truths about Barack Obama.
Yes, New Hampshire fixer Billy Shaheen quit the campaign after
going on a lengthy ramble about Obama’s (long-acknowledged)
youthful use of cocaine, but can the Clintons be so devastated that
the drug story is out there again?
Or take Perry County, Alabama, Commissioner Albert Turner. Early
in December, he told a Democratic group to back Hillary Clinton
because “the question you have to put forth to yourself is that
whether or not in this racist country a black man named Obama —
when we are shooting at Osama — can win the presidency of the
United States?”
Turner, clearly worried about being too subtle, stressed that
Clinton was more electable than Obama “because of her husband and
because of some other things, mainly because she’s white.”
Comments like that could never, ever be spoken by the pride of
Park Ridge, Illinois, herself. And they might not need to be
prompted. Since February, when Barack Obama officially jumped into
the presidential race, Hillary Clinton has maintained a competitive
chunk of the black vote — an edge, actually, until only the last
month.
There are two reasons usually given for this advantage. The
first, amorphous and hard to prove, is that black voters don’t
consider the half-white, half-African Obama
authentically black. Fun to argue about in private but tough to
make into an issue. The closest anyone’s come was former Atlanta
Mayor Andrew Young joking that Bill Clinton had “probably been with
more black women than Barack.”
If Clinton campaign is planning to roll out more surrogates to
argue this, it has kept them awfully quiet.
The other reason the black vote split — Albert Turner’s reason
— is more compelling. It’s that whites won’t vote for a black
man.
It’s an argument bandied about in private every day and shoved
into the spotlight every few months. It really took on weight in
February, when South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford endorsed Hillary explicitly because America
would not elect a black man named Obama.
“We’d lose the House and the Senate and the governors and
everything,” Ford said. “He’d have to get 47 to 49 percent of the
white vote in every state, and that’s humanly impossible.”
In July the Obama-sympathetic (and black) Washington
Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote sadly, “I hear from African Americans who
are excited about Obama’s candidacy but who suspect that somehow,
when push comes to shove, ‘they’ won’t let him win.”
ROBINSON SPECULATED about it, and Ford proved it: This worry
doesn’t actually have any facts backing it up.
The idea that most Americas wouldn’t vote for a black candidate,
the idea that they’ll tell pollsters one thing and then do another,
the idea that Obama would lose the white vote and thereby lose the
presidency: All are fatally flawed notions.
Take the “whites won’t vote for Obama” theory. Every poll taken
this decade has come back with majorities of Americans willing to
vote for a black candidate, believing that the country is ready for
a black president, and believing that their fellow voters share
that enlightenment.
The numbers dip from question to question: Only 4 percent of voters would reject a black
candidate, while a sizable 31 percent of whites doubt the country is ready
for their bold decision. Those white voters, though, are dwarfed by
the 42 percent of blacks who don’t think the country is ready. They
simply refuse to believe what whites tell the pollsters.
The most-respected reason for that skepticism is the “whites are
lying to pollsters” theory, which political scientists actually
have a name for: the “Wilder Effect.” In 1989, Virginia Lt. Gov
Douglas Wilder held a sizable poll lead in the state’s
gubernatorial race. On election night, he nearly lost.
But over the summer the New York Times’ Janet Maslin
investigated the “Wilder Effect” to find if we
could rename it for Obama. It was one of those investigations that
raised more mysteries than it solved.
First, it’s clear that the bullish Wilder polls were flawed: the
very last polls in the race showed some tightening, and the exit
polls that showed a big Wilder win were conducted in person —
there’s more distortion there than you see in telephone polls.
Second, Maslin’s newest piece of data — former Rep. Harold
Ford’s 2006 race for Senate in Tennessee — showed that a lot had
changed in 17 years. Ford actually outperformed polls which showed
him losing badly, winning voters who’d chosen Bush over Kerry,
coming within 3 points of the win.
If Maslin had expanded the survey, she’d have proved it four
more times. Ford was one of five black candidates for either
governor or senator in 2006, the others being Democrat Deval
Patrick for Massachusetts governor and three Republicans: Lynn
Swann for Pennsylvania governor, Ken Blackwell for Ohio governor,
and Michael Steele for a Maryland senate seat.
In every race the black candidate faced a white candidate, and
in every race the results matched up with the final polls within
the margin of error — one or two points. (Steele lost by a little
more, but polls were distorted by an independent candidate who
underperformed on election day.)
Skeptics will argue that the White House is different: People
don’t have to see their senators or governors on TV every day, and
they aren’t handing them the nuclear football. All true, all hard
to prove theoretically, but that third theory — that Obama would
need near-parity or a majority of white votes to win the presidency
— is the most easily debunked.
Democrats never get the 47 to 49 percent of the white vote that
Sen. Robert Ford said Obama would need. They need closer to 44
percent. Al Gore won the popular vote with only 42 percent of the white vote. John Kerry came
one state away from the presidency with 41 percent of the white vote.
In fact, no Democrat has gotten parity with white voters since
Lyndon Johnson convinced America that Barry Goldwater would slip
tactical nukes into their Christmas stockings.
ALL OF THIS COMPLICATES what has always been a shaky argument: that
Hillary Clinton, one of the most polarizing figures in American
politics, is more electable than the Democrats’ alternative.
If she loses the Iowa caucus to Obama he’ll have scooped up
thousands of those liberal white voters who say they’re ready for
him. If that domino falls, New Hampshire is a single-digit race and
she could lose that, too.
Two states with tiny black populations falling to Obama could
dispel some of the worries black Democrats have about what white
voters really think, and the next big-ticket primary will be held
in Robert Ford’s South Carolina, where about half the Democratic
primary electorate is black. Unless their worries are more kneejerk
than 10,000 visits to the doctor’s office, those voters will be
impossible to ignore.
I wondered about how the earlier contests might affect things in
South Carolina, so I called State Senator Ford. He picked up the
phone and I started to ask about the white vote.
“Hold on,” said Ford. “You’re doing what that reporter did.
You’re taking what I said and changing it into some silliness.”
Did he stand by what he said?
“I said Hillary is the candidate who can win, and that reporter
started in, asking about Obama. I don’t spend my time thinking
about Obama.”
But if Obama could win in Iowa and New Hampshire, winning
majorities of white Democrats, would Ford still be worried about
him holding white voters for the Democrats?
“How do you compare a Democratic primary where you have eight
candidates splitting the vote — how would you equate that with an
election with one Republican and one Democrat?” he asked.
It was a pretty good point; those New Hampshire and Iowa white
Democrats are true-blue liberals. Ford pushed on: “You name me
three states that will elect [a] black candidate to a statewide
office.”
I had three: Obama’s Illinois and Massachusetts and Virginia,
the two that have elected black governors.
“What about what happened to Harold Ford in Tennessee? What
happened to that brother in Maryland?”
I pointed out that Virginia and Massachusetts are whiter than
those states.
“What’s getting elected governor of Virginia got to do with
getting elected president? Come on.”
So could Clinton win because she’ll get the black votes Obama
would get plus the white votes candidates like Harold Ford didn’t
get?
“She’d win because she’s the best candidate of all time. I’m not
talking about Barack Obama.”
And what about…
Ford hung up the phone.
