It’s embarrassing to me that Sean Wilentz teaches at Princeton University. It puts a stain on the entire town. Wilentz has spent this entire primary defending the Clintons against accusations that they have deliberately racialized the campaign. Now he comes out and argues that Obama does not appeal to white working class voters. Dishonest throughout, Wilentz makes no connection between the Clintons’ tactics and rhetoric and results like this:
Pike County, Kentucky
Hillary Clinton 12,915 91%
Barack Obama 936 7%
Undecided 196 1%
Rather than look at the results out of Appalachia for what they are, Wilentz launches an unmerciful attack at the new New Left:
Having attempted, with the aid of a complicit news media, to brand Hillary Clinton as a racist — by flinging charges that, as the historian Michael Lind has shown, belong “in black helicopter/grassy knoll territory,” Obama’s supporters now fiercely claim that Clinton’s white working class following is also essentially racist. Favoring the buzzword language of the academic left, tinged by persistent, discredited New Left and black nationalist theories about working-class “white skin privilege,” a vote against Obama has become, according to his fervent followers, “a vote for whiteness.”
Sen. Jim Webb, who is somewhat of a historian/anthropologist/member of the Appalachian culture, doesn’t like to hear people attribute the primary results to racism. His explanation is more nuanced:
“This isn’t Selma, 1965. This is a result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white, and these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. And they’re basically saying let’s pay attention to what has happened to this cultural group in terms of opportunities.”
I like how Sen. Webb is responding to this issue from a political point of view, but he’s parsing beyond what the facts will allow. Pike County, Kentucky voted against Obama because he is black. It’s that simple. If you want to know why they don’t trust black people, that’s an interesting question and Webb’s answer is as good as any I’ve seen. But racism is what explains the results. Others can dissect the causes of racism. And Clinton fed right into this racism by telling the voters of Pike County that she was their candidate and the other guy was a big-city elitist with weird religious ideas.
Despite the fact that exit polls showed the 18% of white voters thought race was important and that 88% of them (state-wide) voted for Clinton, Wilentz says there is no evidence of racism.
In fact, all of the evidence demonstrates that white racism has not been a principal or even secondary motivation in any of this year’s Democratic primaries. Every poll shows that economics, health care, and national security are the leading issues for white working class voters – and for Latino working class voters as well. These constituencies have cast positive ballots for Hillary Clinton not because she is white, but because they regard her as better on these issues.
Really? Ninety-one to seven percent better?
Selectively ignoring exit polls and county results is no way to further an academic career. But Wilentz’s worst error is his analysis of what it takes to win the Electoral College. He goes into great detail to explain to us how important it has been historically to win certain states. None of that matters. All that matters is who gets more Electoral College votes. No one cares which states are in which column, we only care about who has 270 or more votes.
If Obama wins all Kerry states (and he currently leads in the polls in all Kerry states except New Hampshire) then simply winning Iowa, New Mexico, and Nevada gives us a 269-269 tie, which Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives will decide in Obama’s favor. Never mind that Obama is currently polling ahead in Indiana and Virginia, and that Clinton is losing to McCain in Wisconsin and Michigan. Wilentz isn’t concerned with facts. For him, winning an election that doesn’t include Kentucky and West Virginia is a betrayal of the Democratic Party’s heritage.
Out with the Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson, F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, and in with the bright, shiny party of Obama – or what the formally “undeclared” Donna Brazile, a member of the Democratic National Committee and of the party’s rules committee, has hailed as a “new Democratic coalition” swelled by affluent white leftists and liberals, college students, and African-Americans.
The Democratic Party, as a modern political party, dates back to 1828, when Andrew Jackson crushed John Quincy Adams to win the presidency. Yet without the votes of workers and small farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as a strong Democratic turnout in New York City, Jackson would have lost the Electoral College in a landslide. Over the 180 years since then, only one Democrat has gained the presidency without winning either Ohio or Pennsylvania, with their large white working-class vote.
According to Pollster.com’s polling average, Obama is currently ahead in Pennsylvania by 5 points and SurveyUSA has him with a 48%-39% lead in Ohio. It’s odd for Wilentz to make the argument that Obama won’t win in states where he is currently polling ahead. But what’s really dishonest, at least in the case of Ohio, is that Obama needs to win these states. He’d like to win them, but he doesn’t need to win them. He has consistently polled well ahead in Colorado and he has leads in Iowa, Indiana and Virginia. Winning those states while holding Kerry’s states would provide a 292-246 Electoral College victory. Do you think the white working class people of Iowa and Indiana would wring their hands that the Democratic Party won without Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia? I don’t.
Given that Obama’s vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.
I didn’t know that Maine, Iowa, Oregon, and Colorado had that many college towns and African-Americans. Once again, Wilentz ignores the regional factor in racial resistance to Barack Obama. It’s as if the only white working class people in the country come from Appalachia. Given that Obama currently has a lead in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Indiana it’s kind of hard for me to see this looming disaster in November. I’m more concerned with why Clinton is doing so badly in Iowa, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Gore won Iowa and Bill Clinton won all of these states. Why is Clinton trailing there?
Culturally as well as politically, Obama’s dismissal of white working people represents a sea-change in the Democrats’ basic identity as the workingman’s party – one that has been coming since the late 1960s, when large portions of the Left began regarding white workers as hopeless and hateful reactionaries. Faced with the revolt of the “Reagan Democrats” – whose politics they interpreted in the narrowest of racial terms – “new politics” Democrats dreamed of a coalition built around an alliance of right-thinking affluent liberals and downtrodden minorities, especially African-Americans. It all came to nothing.
Obama isn’t dismissing white working people at all. But what do you expect him to do? Go to Pike County, Kentucky to fish for votes? Even in a closed Democratic primary he only won 936 votes there. Those people aren’t reacting to his message or lack of message. Their not looking one inch beyond the surface of his skin. And don’t be surprised if he shows up there anyway to explain that he will work hard for their economic opportunity while McCain will only pander to their guns and God and feelings about abortion. It’s not as if Obama is scared of those people. But this is an election and elections involve strategy. You don’t spend your efforts in places that aren’t going to give you more than 10% of the vote even after you’ve secured the most delegates in the race.
Sean Wilentz is a dishonest wanking hack.
Were you IN Pike County? Have you ever been to Pike County?
In 1985 Doug Wilder won his race for Lt Gov partly because SW Virginia voted for him, they did so again in 1989. That was 29 years ago. Appalachia will support a black candidate over a white. But you have to do what Wilder did, you have to go there an campaign. Obama didn’t do that, he just did TV commercials. Applachia is one of the least racist parts of the south, and if you thought about it for ten minutes, you would work out why that is so. I would say that Applachia is less racist than Indiana or even New York.
Obama lost because of the “bitter” remarks that were leaked out and because he didn’t campaign.
Alice, please. I mean, please.
This was a closed Democratic primary. And Obama received 7% of the vote. In adjacent counties in Virginia he did only slightly better, way before Rev. Wright or Bittergate. That does not explain why the presumptive nominee got beaten 12,000 to 936.
Least racist part of the South? Not a chance. It’s by far the most racist part of the country. You can find similar areas in Philly and Boston and Detroit’s suburbs, but even there they have more tolerance for black people. I’ve looked at county-by-county results in every contest this year and I know exactly where the racial resistance has been strongest. Northeastern Mississippi, Southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina, the southwestern border of Pennsylvania, Scanton, Pennslyvania, and parts of Oklahoma and Missouri and Southern Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Here’s a map of where Clinton got at least 60% of the vote:
Also, you can fill Kentucky in dark as these maps were made before that contest. Here is where Clinton got 70% of the vote.
That does not explain why the presumptive nominee got beaten 12,000 to 936.
Maybe they don’t buy your story that Obama is the presumptive nominee. Maybe they still think that this is a contest.
How do you explain Wilder’s victory in 1985 and 1989?
If you didn’t notice, Obama won a crushing victory in Virginia while he took a crushing defeat in Kentucky. Wilder would have been crushed in Kentucky, too.
Obama lost SW Virginia, he won everywhere else, but Clinton won SW Virginia. Maybe it is because she learned politics in Arkansas, maybe she understands redknecks.
After seeing some TV clips of voters citing Obama being a Muslim as their reason for voting for Hillary…. I think it may not be about race, per se, but otherness. Hillary’s minstrel show of taking shots and talking about shooting may have worked to some extent; but more to the point, Obama’s not as good at seeming un-Ivy-League as Hillary is. All that coupled with not visiting with people in Appalachia much cemented the Otherness of Obama.
So you think that people are so not-bitter about their lot that they voted against Obama over him suggesting that they were? Or what? Or you think that there is a groundswell of Hillaryfiles up in the hills?
truthfully I didn’t follow it closely enough to say. I just think we need to give our fellow Democrats for making decisions on what they thought was best.
I did her the tape of Obama explaining to his donors that he lost PA (or that he was polling poorly in PA, I forget which) because rural whites were bitter about losing jobs and clinging to their religion and guns. Now that is not exactly how he put it, and I don’t think Obama was disrespecting them, but that is how it came across. I think Obama lost because voters in Appalachia felt disrespected. I think it was made worse by Obama’s decision to not even try to campaign. He may have made the right decision to put his resources elsewhere, but not campaigning was a big problem.
truthfully I am very discouraged with the presidential. I was for Gore, then Edwards, and now really just want it to be over.
I think Obama is doing things that will do us great harm in the general. The first is that he wants to disenfranchise FL and MI. I have heard all the spin on this, but Obama’s approach just jinxs us in the general. This has zero to do w/ what I think of Clinton. This is about the voters of ML and FL. This most recent spin against KY and WV not only jinxs us with those two states in the general, it puts many white people on the defensive in a way that does not work for us.
I really don’t know what to do.
Alice, it’s more than that. I’ve read your posts. You’re bitter. I’m bitter. People all across the country are bitter.
The political question for the region is: “Are you bitter or are you just not glad to see a black man?” Racism has functioned among the poor whites in America as the floor through which they refuse to fall. You know, “I may be poor, but at least I’m not black.” To see an intelligent, articulate black man run for President is scary for them. They are constricted by their prejudices and if a black man is above them, they truly have fallen through the floor.
Back to your thesis: Are the people in Appalachia so unbitter that they are overwhelmingly resentful for suggesting that people in Pennsylvania who lose their jobs are bitter? Are the white rural folks so joyful that that ten, twenty, thirty years of watching their jobs disappear just fills their hearts with joy?
The decision to stay out of WV and Kentucky was made by the Obama campaign after it was clear that he wasn’t going to budge the resentfully unbitter hard-working white people there to vote for the half-blood Muslim with that crazy, hateful black minister.
But not campaigning there was a tactic in the primaries when it was better to focus on other areas. The Republicans would be foolish to think that Obama won’t fight for those votes in general election or that he won’t get some of them.
Maybe you need a better, not bitter theory for why these hard-working white people in Appalachia are so different from white people in Iowa, Oregon, Nevada, Texas, Missouri, California, Minnesota, etc. Maybe they were just too damned happy to vote for a black man.
that still doesn’t explain why SW Virginia gave Doug Wilder his margin of victory in 1985 and 1989.
Here’s a map of the Wilder results:
As you can see, he did not carry the counties that border Kentucky. But he did do impressively well in other parts of Appalachia.
Wilder lost the coal counties. That surprises me, he lost east of the Clinch River. Those counties usually go Democratic.
I think the color coding on that is opposite of the usual. That little red dot in the middle is the city of Richmond, Wilder carried that by a landslide. So my original assumption was correct, Wilder carried the coal counties and the city of Galax. I thought he did better in the rest of SW, but it seems he did not.
yes, you’re right. So why did he do well in just that one part of the Southwest?
the UMWA delivered their vote
Your question got me curious. I found this analysis of the ’85 election.
Some interesting points (highlights are mine):
IT was a brilliant ad. The deputy sheriff had such a thick southside accent that their TV commercials had subtitles in the Wash DC TV market. He really was the deputy sherriff from central casting and I am surprised that Obama has not used him.
Also, the famous tour of SW Virginia was followed by the press very closely. The local press were pleased because usually SW Virginia is ignored by politicians until the final week of the campaign, so all the local papers, radio, TV followed Wilder where ever he went. The statewide press also enjoyed the novelty factor of a black politician roaming around the back county of Virginia. It was a brilliant campaign.
Wilentz is a dick. Problem is, there’s a problem, even if Wilentz doesn’t admit that his Hillary is part of it.
The problem that the Democrats always have is that their constituency is broad and diverse. The megamedia (you know, those folks that Bill Clinton allowed to merge a decade back) does the devil’s work, constantly dividing up the Dems’ constituency. What Obama necessarily must do, and has done pretty well so far, is to show that what is screwing over the white folks in the hills is screwing over the black folks in the city. It’s the same hand picking everyone’s pockets. And then after Obama shows how we’re all in the same boat he needs to show us what direction the boat needs to go and how to get where we’re going.
And then all Obama has to do is pass out the oars.
Putzes like Sean Wilentz can swim to shore on their own.
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Reminder: In Salon.com Wilentz came up with the meme that Hillary is actually winning if the primaries were winner-take-all like the Republicans. If wishes were horses, Sean.
In the old days when I worked those seminars in the army we talked about “racism” and “institutional racism.” Wilentz is from an “institute of racism.” He sees a crack in humanity and puts a wedge in it. He thinks he’s a smart guy. He’s a wretched, despicable fool. God damn him.
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Reminder II: Joan Walsh has a concern troll piece in Salon about how white racism will hurt Obama. That message from Clinton headquarters must have gone out last week. They still haven’t stopped. Remember that when Clinton tries to run again for the Senate.
I ‘loved’ the winner-take-all scenario. It was bad enough that a fantasy construct had to be used to infer a Clinton advantage, but to use an invented situation in which an unrepresentative scheme was also employed to generate that Clinton win was worse.
Notice the frequent, and odd, juxtaposition of fantasy schemes with rhetoric for counting all the votes. Denial is a situation where one needs to resort to fantastic explanations to account for an unacceptable psychological reality.
Re: the Walsh piece. Thanks.
It’s become a second order phenomenon, just as it was for Hillary. The Clinton campaign used the “hardworking” motif early on and justified their tactic as merely reporting on the election results. Purportedly, they weren’t deliberately activating racist attitudes (which we know occurs when code terms like “hardworking” are used in a certain context), but rather, she was simply stating what was true without inferring a motive for that phenomenon.
Joan Walsh is a DLC concern troll…nuff’ said
As a gay man I must say that Sean is just ANOTHER silly queen that can’t let go of the fact that Hillary has lost, he like many of the other sillies I have talked to recently have revealed themselves to be the below the surface racists, I always thought they were, and the more intelligent ones have really been trying anyway they can to justify their racist views by flinging nonsensical rhetoric against Obama and his supporters, and blamiung them in true Rovian manner that they are the fault for Miss Hillary’s demise.
FAct;
25% of gay white men voted for George w Bush in 2004
Sean and his ilk were part of that 25% ….
These are the same 25% that are now screaming the same nonsense that Sean(y) just flug at Obama…
Well this Obama supporters thinks like this
If you fling shit in my vicinity expect it to come right back at you….
I have had enough of this nonsense especially from my gay brothers and sisters…….
Now there’s a political alliance I didn’t see coming: racist gays and unbitter hard-working white Appalachians.
Isn’t the message from the MSM that (elite) Dems always have problems with working people?
It’s kind of a strange conclusion since a glance at the respective Dem and GOP agendas would seem to suggest a far different outcome but there you have it: the party with the agenda most supportive of working people always has the most problems with working people.
<snark off>
In reality, I wonder how the numbers pan out — outside of the south.
.
There is no evidence of racist undertone in Pike county vote. This is a foremost coalmining county and Hillary Clinton ran a good campaign with themes the people liked.
PRESTONBURG, KY (Wall Street Journal) May 19, 2008 – Tapper cites electoral maps produced by Karl Rove & Co., the former Bush advisor’s consulting firm, taking a look at hypothetical contests between Sen. John McCain and both Democratic candidates.
The map that pits Sen. Barack Obama against McCain shows McCain leading with 238 electoral votes, compared with 221 for Obama. A Clinton-McCain contest, on the other hand, shows Clinton up with 259 electoral votes, compared with 206 for the Arizona senator. A total of 270 electoral votes are needed to win the presidency, and the analyses of both matchups — based on an averages of public polls — show several states too close to call.
…
Clinton also hit several notes important to coal miners — the town is located in coal-rich eastern Kentucky.
“Here in coal country, there is an imperative that we move quick on 10 big demonstration projects — one of them should be right here in eastern Kentucky — to figure out how we’re going to move toward clean coal and clean coal technology. ”
Clinton added that “we’ve got to have more emphasis on mine safety, something that I’ve worked on in the Senate and something that I’m committed to and have a whole agenda to address, so that we protect those who are mining out and distributing this important resource.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There’s an amazing amount of that going on, particularly among the Clinton pundits. What can they possibly be thinking? That the rest of us are just stupid and will simply accept their selective omissions in the articles and data they so carefully tiptoe through to cherrypick to make their tortured and dishonest arguments? Reading some of them lately is like reading National Review or Michelle Malkin.
Are none of them thinking ahead to the hundreds or thousands of their readers they’re misleading on everything from the character to the intentions to the policies of the person who is shortly to become our nominee? Their readers – people who trust them to present honest analysis even if it is partisan – now hate, distrust, and feel contempt for Obama to the point where they now say they prefer to vote for McCain – and all for reasons that are often completely baseless, completely absurd and untrue. Take this claim for instance that Obama is “dismissing white working people.” Aside from it being absurd, untrue, and inflammatory, it’s harmful to forming a winning coalition for the fall, yet the Clinton pundits promote it or allow it to be promoted over and over among their commenters, just one of many destructive falsehoods they’ve fostered. They have caused this situation. Do they think they can undo the depths of hatred they’ve created now?
Frank criticism even when it’s harsh and uncompromising, as long as it’s based on something factual is one thing, even when it’s honestly mistaken or slanted by non-self-aware bias, and with it I have no problem in the least. But knowing distortion, selective omission of facts and statements, and conscious cherrypicking of data and parts of articles to make utterly misleading arguments shows that they’re doing no such thing. They’re just trying to hide their partisan agenda under the guise of analysis. All they actually want is for their candidate to win. It’s the rankest intellectual dishonesty. I have lost all respect for the people who’ve been engaging in it this primary season.
Hillary’s appeal to older women is easily explained through identity politics but her appeal to “hardworking whites” is more difficult to explain if we use the campaign’s original message. It’s true that the Clinton campaign responded to their successes during the campaign, but inferring a large differential in the appeal of the two candidates based on slight policy differences is a tenuous assumption — at best.
Working class whites don’t normally appreciate “experience” to a disproportionate degree when compared to other socio-economic groups with similar political leanings, although ‘blue-collar’ groups may be more conservative in a risk aversive sense and might find Clinton a safer choice. But the problem with explanations of Clinton’s success that rely on her appeal to the blue collar demographic is — of course — that there has been strong regional flavor to this phenomenon.
Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine and Oregon didn’t show Clinton as having a significant advantage (or necessarily any advantage in absolute numbers) with blue collar demographic groups, so explanations that cite the Clinton campaign’s current rhetoric to these groups is badly misguided.
There are a number of explanations that have been offered for the blue collar effect for Clinton voters, such as: (1) type of communication/mass media dependent/low information voters, (2) traditionalist, ‘stay at home voters,’ (3) cultural conservatism, guns & prayer voters, (4) ideology, (5) egalitarian v. elite appeal. And let me add another — (6) exacerbated intergroup tensions during declining/uncertain economic periods.
It’s always been difficult to believe that Clinton, the ex-corporate lawyer, held a huge advantage in appealing to blue collar demographic groups over Obama, the former community organizer. Some of the differential can be explained using the reasons listed above, but it’s very difficult to explain why many states have shown only a slight differential (often none in absolute terms) while other states show a pronounced blue collar effect.
Overt racism is rarer nowadays but it could be said that it’s merely gone underground. Latent racist attitudes lurk beneath the surface and are activated through an often heard code, which has changed over time from expressions such as “state’s right’s” and “busing” to less recognizable terms.
As the racial code shifted over time, from transparent references to the “those shiftless people” favored by the segregationists to a more subtle terminology, so did some of the attitudes. But while support for segregation gave way to social pressures, remnants of the old attitudes remained in a new form. As Lee Atwater explained shortly before his death:
References to “working class white people” always deserve scrutiny, but there are real grievances, too. Although most of the coalition shift that occurred within the Democratic party since the sixties was the result of the Civil Rights Act, which led many white males to leave the party. Rightly or wrongly, many them began to see the Democratic Party as a collection of special interest groups that served the interests of everyone but them. And the GOP was willing to take advantage of this opportunity.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=68225069-3048-5C12-00FA02842EFBC1AA