I don’t know if Mickey Kaus is a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican, and I don’t suppose he has to be crammed into any particular box. Above all, he is a mentally challenged person. James Wolcott has called him a ‘counterintuitive’ journalist, meaning that he takes positions counter to conventional wisdom. That kind of writing has its place; the merit resides in…well…the merit of the unconventional thinking. That’s the test that Kaus consistently fails. Take today’s column, How Obama Can Win: He can escape his electoral ghetto by playing the race-blind card. It’s idiotic.
Now the idea that Obama has been “ghettoized” as the “black” candidate has become the accepted template for the campaign–even the point that a win in hotly contested South Carolina on Saturday is seen as actually hurting Obama because (in Dick Morris’ analysis)
[w]atching blacks block vote for Obama will trigger a white backlash that will help Hillary win Florida and to prevail the week after.
Here we thought we were getting the Mondale/Hart campaign of 1984–without Mondale’s pleasantness or Hart’s weirdness–and instead we get the Dukakis campaign of 1988, in which a slightly tedious, marginally likeable elite liberal established his mainstream (white) bona fides by running around the country thumping Jesse Jackson.
Worse, it’s hard to see an easy way out of it for Obama, at least before the wave of primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5. He could try to make Hillary the pet candidate of Latinos the way he’s being cast as the pet candidate of blacks–but that would require a shift to the right on immigrant legalization that he doesn’t seem willing to make. (I hope I’m wrong about that.)
The more obvious move is to find a Sister Souljah–after Saturday–to stiff arm. The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn’t that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He’d renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). The howls of criticism from the conventional civil-rights establishment–they’d flood the cable shows–would provide him with an army of Souljahs to hold off. If anyone noticed Hillary in the ensuing fuss, it would be to put her on the spot–she’d be the one defending mend-it-don’t-end-it civil rights orthodoxy.
Here Kaus takes two of his pet peeves (illegal immigration and affirmative action) and develops a political strategy for Obama that, just coincidentally, involves Obama taking up those two pet peeves.
Kaus wants Obama to come out swinging on illegal immigration Tancredo-style, as if this would somehow help him compete in California, New York, and other February 5th contests. How congruent would that strategy be with Obama’s core values and his message of unity and hope? But, recognizing that this is not a strategy Obama is likely to take, Kaus wants him to come out forcefully against affirmative action (but only after he suckers the black community of South Carolina into voting for him).
Before we talk about the merits of such a strategy, we need to look at the lay of the land. Obama is drawing his strongest support from African-Americans, but in both New Hampshire and Nevada, he pulled his strongest support from rural and exurban areas (for example, Obama won Nevada’s Elko County by 63%-31%). Clinton, meanwhile, drew her strongest support from urban Manchester and Las Vegas. If there is a simple reason that Obama lost in both New Hampshire and Nevada, it is the relative lack of urban black voters in those two states.
Obama only needs to maintain his strength outside the cities and enjoy the advantage of the urban black vote in places like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City in order to start winning these contests. The Clintons know this, which is why they are trying to ghettoize Obama’s campaign.
Kaus wants Obama to respond by dissing both the black and the Hispanic population in order to make himself seem more white. Another way of looking at this is that Kaus wants Obama to start running to Clinton’s right. Let’s consider this for a moment. In the New Hampshire exit polls, Obama won the white male vote 38%-30%, and lost the overall white vote by a mere 36%-39%. His problem? Only 1% of the vote was black. Meanwhile, Obama lost the Democratic vote 34%-45%. As for ideology, Obama and Clinton were essentially tied in all categories, from very liberal to very conservative. Do you think he should run further to the right?
Obama is already positioned where he needs to be. What he cannot allow is for the Clintons to turn this into a black vs. white contest, where Obama’s advantage among white men suddenly dries up. Yes, Obama could try to prevent that possibility by pandering to white men that dislike Hispanics and affirmative action, but not without taking a beating from progressives and Latinos, and weakening his support in the African-American community.
What Obama needs to do is firm up his support and make inroads into Hillary’s core constituencies, which are union households, older women, and Hispanics.
I swear, any idiot can get a column in a major newspaper or e-zine if they are either a conservative, or a moron that will say unconventional things about minorities.
