Big Think

Unforced Error: Obama as San Fran Liberal Elitist

It's difficult to underestimate the enduring impact of Barack Obama's "bitter" remark. The day after John Kerry blurted that he "actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" Vice President Dick Cheney ripped into the Democratic nominee and GOP strategists were already envisioning a new ad featuring the gaffe, intent on undercutting Kerry's character as a flip-flopper. That week, four years ago, there were no banner headlines in major American newspapers declaring a turning point in the presidential race. Soon after the remark Kerry took a break from the campaign and skied at a resort in Idaho, a trip that added the air of elitism to Kerry's already sundered grit. The Bush campaign had effectively won the campaign. It was only mid March. In time we will know the gravity of Obama's recent comment that many Americans in the small towns across the Midwest "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment" because they are "bitter" over economic anxiety. Since the remarks came forward, Obama's opponents have pounced. Hillary Clinton told plant workers that the comments were "elitist and out of touch." John McCain agreed. The Republican National Committee sent out more than 10 emails to political reporters in the 24 hours after the comments were made public, pushing the storyline that Obama is, you guessed it, an elitist. The Democratic National Committee's press shop was silent. Manufactured disgust, all too prevalent in our politics today, should not be mistaken for the legitimate disgust. Obama has caused some legitimate disgust. And he should heed that disgust, and heed it fast. But so far he is not. Instead Obama stays true to character, tepidly combative and totally cool. Obama has stood by the remark. He has said that he could have been more rhetorically tactful -- a defense reminiscent of Kerry's explanation. Political attacks work when they reinforce real perceptions. They become narratives when built on enough anecdotes. And those attacks can become critical when they seem to confirm long-held partisan stereotypes. Obama has just provided what may prove to be the keystone in the arc of Republican attacks. Obama expounded Saturday on his remark. "Everybody knows" that his comment "is true," Obama stated. There are "a whole bunch of folks in small towns" who "feel like they have been left behind." That is true. But that's not the issue now haunting his bid for the presidency. Obama inferred that rural Americans stance on religion, guns, or immigration is an outcome of economic determinism. The line of thought: Middle American Joe struggles to make his bills, Democrats don't offer economic answers, Republicans con Joe to care more about cultural issues than answers, and GOP dominants the White House for four decades. What's The Matter With Obama's Words, Not Kansas "They don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody's going to help them," Obama said, in an attempt to contextualize his remark. "So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns" or "gay marriage" or "take refuge in their faith." To many liberals this all makes perfect sense. Indeed Obama's perspective is the prevailing viewpoint in Democratic circles. And this is what's the matter with a party that has accepted "What's the Matter with Kansas" as gospel. No book has more influenced Democratic thought in recent years. The premise is that because Democrats stopped representing working and middle class voters' economic concerns, "dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to wedge issues." Obama has merely reiterated the lesson Democrats have taken from Republicans victories in seven of the last ten presidential elections. The crux of the argument is that American liberals should become more like European liberals in order to win back America. The book was a case for Democrats to convince voters to think more in terms of cash than culture. Frank argued Democrats should emulate the economic populism that failed to win any of William Jennings Bryan's three bids for the presidency. But that's merely poor tactics. What is always so offensive to regular Americans is the presumption that if she is offered better tax policies she won't care any longer about abortion. And the viewpoint holds from one issue to the next: offer rural white men rhetoric that reminds them that they are working class and he'll accept that the Second Amendment only referred to militias. Then there is the exhibited ignorance. Families who struggle financially care more about moral values because they are more likely to experience the breakdown of the family. In other words, cultural issues are not a substitute for economic concerns, as Obama argues, but inseparable from folks economic struggle. All of this is exactly the sort of mistake Democrats have been making for decades. How many times can some leading liberals live up to the culturally elitist charge without considering that perhaps there is some electricity behind the charge? What Dogmatic Liberals Miss, and Realist Liberals Get Liberals certainly, when compared to conservatives, concern themselves more with the economic anxieties of the working and middle class, tax policy is a prime example. But Republicans concern themselves more with their cultural anxieties, from "cultural pollution" to guns to abortion. Many liberals get rural America so wrong because, as The Pew Research Center for People and the Press found, not only do "most Liberals live in a world apart from Disadvantaged Democrats and Conservative Democrats," but also rural voters. Pew's 2005 typology study found that liberals are the least religious group, more than one-third are never married, they are the most urban, and the least likely to have a gun in the home or attend bible study or a prayer group. About all they have in common with rural voters is their race, more than eight in ten liberals are white. Obama's base among white voters is disproportionately from liberals and those who have at least a college education. His Ivy League biography, even his professional manner, personifies his largest bloc of white support. On the campaign trail one sometimes can tell. Last year he responded to an Iowa farmers concerns about crop prices by asking if "anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?" There are no Whole Foods in Iowa. Recently Obama tried to bowl in Pennsylvania and looked like the sort of Democrat who thinks of Whole Foods when discussing crop prices. Now Obama talks about what drives rural voters' cultural concerns and ends up looking like the kind of Democrat who bowls a 37 in seven frames. Soon there is a storyline. The silly is now serious. It seems that every time Obama makes a mistake he brings it up again, offers context, laughs about it, and then defends it. No matter, the bowling and arugula mistakes were still small time. But the bitter remark was a game changer. What must be disheartening to some Democrats is that on other occasions Obama has shown pinpoint insight into the voters Democrats lost in recent decades. In his seminal race speech, written by Obama, he said that "most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch." No other major Democrat has uttered such words in recent memory. It was a beginning. That beginning is now deeply undercut. To boot, Obama already had problems with small town voters. In the Appalachia region of Ohio, Clinton won over 65 percent of the vote. Obama has put out advertising in Pennsylvania to emphasize that his values are the same as regular folks' values. But then this comes out. It appears Obama misunderstands how regular Americans arrive at their values. History Does Not Repeat, But Liberals Ensure it Rhymes That Obama's bitter remark occurred before a crowd of wealthy San Francisco Democrats made his gaffe all the more sophomoric. The progressive party never seems to look back enough. It was not the first time Obama lived up to Jeane Kirkpatrick's branding of "San Francisco Democrats." Reminiscent of Michael Dukakis and the pledge of allegiance, Obama stopped wearing a flag on his lapel because it "became a substitute for" what is "true patriotism." Michelle Obama's aside about her newfound pride as an American, watching this race, didn't help matters. Neither did the video of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The patriotism mistakes will matter. He is not doing much to refute Kirkpatrick's other zinger from that same 1984 speech: that Democrats are supposedly the "blame America first" party. But I'm not sure any of those mistakes, even Wright, will matter as much as the bitter remark. After all, it came from Obama. At some point Democratic intellectuals need to come to the consensus that they did not get defeated in recent decades simply because Republicans "framed" issues better, or appealed better to voters emotions, or because Democrats have not found their inner Bryan. Every cycle there is an "it theory" popular within the Democratic chattering class. Now there is some truth to each thesis. But not the great truth: Democrats lost their majority because they lost touch with that "silent majority." Richard Nixon may have been paranoid but paranoids are not always dumb. Some of this "silent majority's" concerns were not sexist, or racist, but wholly real and as Obama himself has said, based in authentic distress. "So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time," Obama said in his race speech. Indeed, Obama was explaining that sometimes Democrats mistake the color of the issue for the issue. We are a nation defined by our original sin of slavery and therefore, slaves to that racial worldview. We so often see race where class exists. Similarly, many liberals misperceive values politics. They so often see cultural stances for their worst manifestations while ignoring their best. Guns become tools for murder rather than occasions for fathers and sons to hunt. Abortion is always about limiting a woman's autonomy rather than differing views on life. Concerns over illegal immigration are based in xenophobia rather than, at least sometimes, a valid desire to expect future immigrants to abide by the same rules as those immigrants from the century before. Now there was some truth to Obama's argument. A recent Democratic administration did not sufficiently stand up "for those who work hard and play by the rules." NAFTA ended up making life much worse for so many of those hard workers, the bulk of which were the white working class men that Democrats needed to win back -- Bruce Springsteen voters. It is also true that people struggling economically care more about the competition born of labor-class immigration, just as the Irish were concerned about the competition from freed slaves following Reconstruction. It is why today many blacks are equally concerned about competition from Hispanic immigrants. Those who are struggling know the brutality of the bottom, as John Updike describes it, and therefore they will take almost any stance and most any step to keep one step ahead of that bottom. But that does not mean that there are not valid law and order concerns over illegal immigration, or that it is not advantageous to emphasize English immersion for cultural cohesion and to empower immigrants to rise up the economic ladder. Where Obama and many Democrats go wrong is describing cultural stances as outcomes of hard times, rather than principled, joyful, well-intentioned, or long treasured family traditions. Reality lingers in both theories. But Democrats too often mention the worst and forget the best, as Obama did. In Obama's defense, he spoke of family traditions on Saturday. But context is always hard after the gaffe. Just ask McCain and Republicans about their struggle since early January to contextualize his 100-year remark on Iraq. *** David Paul Kuhn, a Politico.com senior political writer, is author of the The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma. Related: Jane Smiley: Here We Go Again

April 13, 2008, 3:45 PM

Obama's Dukakis Moment: Bowling Blunders Matter

Last week many had their fun poking fun at Barack Obama's gutter balls. Monday on Ellen Hillary Clinton decided to toss a little ball at some pins on set in order to keep Obama's bowling blunder in the conversation. It wasn't the most tactful response. But Obama's poor showing was again talked about. Forest for the trees, bad bowling really should not matter in the making of the president. Right? We are likely in a recession. We are at war. A lot of folks don't have health insurance. Great presidents need not be able to bowl. But then, it does matter if he is to win that Oval Office. What Obama's bowling highlighted was a larger mistake he cannot make when reaching out to the white working and middle class. He cannot be the man he is not. This has less to do with his race than his Ivy League professorial demeanor. Democrats have long nominated candidates who exude the worst stereotypes of the conceived liberal elitist. It's not bowling that's the point. Many modern presidential candidates have bowled on the trail. But there is something particularly embarrassing about a 37 in seven frames for a candidate who is attempting to prove he is one of the guys. What could prove fatal is if Obama keeps making this mistake. A far more consequential version occurred in the 1988 race. Michael Dukakis donned military coveralls on top of his suit, got inside that M-1 tank, gripped the machine gun, and murmured "rat-a-tat." He looked like a boy playing war and was pummeled for his Patton moment. "The tank has to go down in history as one of the classic political blunders in the world," Ronald Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, once told me. "It goes back to my point. You can't stretch the candidate. You've got to portray who he naturally is." All politics is Shakespeare. When John Kerry spent the whole of his 2004 convention calling attention to his service in Vietnam, it highlighted Democrats' own national security insecurity. "The lady doth protests too much," as it was put in Hamlet. Obama's bowling was not Dukakis' tank moment. But it did become the butt of late night comedians. Jimmy Kimmel quipped, "I bowled a 37 when I was a baby and I was drunk, by the way." Obama can ill afford to offer Kimmel such good material if he is to make inroads with middle and working class white men. Issues matter, but not as much as our conception of the person advocating those issues. This was not Obama's first time stepping into a role he could not pull off. Last October, Obama went on Ellen himself. He danced in a way that was well, consistent with a stiff professor. But of course that's an issue of undermining his "cool," a positive perception not so easily refuted by John McCain. Bowling is an issue of undermining his inner regular Joe, one easily refuted by McCain. Obama should have known that if he cannot bowl, he should not bowl. A president does not throw out the first pitch, if he cannot throw a pitch. It has always been a male presidential candidate's burden to not sissify him self on the campaign trail, an inconvenience that falls particularly on Democratic candidates because of past mistakes. That does not mean bowling is that masculine. It's not in fact. But it is emasculating to attempt to be the kind of guy that bowls and look like the kind of guy who does not. It would be absurd to discuss bowling in the context of the presidency if it did not evoke a larger lesson. Reagan, as well as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, understood that symbols, narratives, and sets win presidencies. Should Obama not, it will lead to a Dukakis-like moment that could serve as his tattooed slip up. Consider JFK. Even as he was suffering from Addison's disease he was shown swimming or tossing a football with his family. FDR more famously hid his disability. But he also pioneered the use of themes in radio to captivate voters. In this YouTube age a candidate's image cannot be tailored as even Reagan's was. But then images now matter all the more because the mistakes are replayed ad nauseam. Obama's bus tour through Pennsylvania was an attempt to ground his lofty image. In America, a presidential candidate cannot just care about the people he must show he is one of the people. So Obama ate chilidogs. Fed a calf. Toured a factory. The trip was meant to show him as one of us. But he ended up looking like one of them -- them being that liberal caricature. It is axiomatic in presidential politics that a candidate must refute the worst stereotypes of his party. At least Kerry was a good shot when he put on L.L. Bean and blew two pheasants out of the sky. The problem was Kerry also went parasailing and snowboarding, against his senior staff's advice. The elite vacations reaffirmed the negative perception of liberals as elite. That, like the tank moment, made it into Republican ads. Obama decries the superficial in our politics. And perhaps he can win denouncing gutter politics and throwing gutter balls. But that's not the making of past presidents. Sometimes, even as we "turn the page" it's important to consider the lessons of all those earlier chapters (even the silly ones). *** David Paul Kuhn, a Politico.com senior political writer, is author of the The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.

April 9, 2008, 7:14 AM

White Men Seen All Wrong

Washington analysts are beginning to notice a curious fact of the Democratic race. In a primary contest between the first black or female nominee, white men are the critical swing vote. Yet despite white males still disproportionately representing us in politics, we still misunderstand them as voters. There remains a chasm between our conception of the powerful executive and the reality of the everyman. Our culture continues to define the typical white man more for his vice than virtue. The perception of the "angry white male" has not left us. Many still remain apprehensive to discuss white men as a constituency. They are, after all, supposed to be the reason we have to focus on constituencies. Even many pundits who viscerally understand these men, like Chris Matthews, have recently misperceived what motivates this bloc's choice between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. This past weekend, on his weekly Sunday morning show, Matthews asked writer Gloria Borger: "Is there a resistance to an African-American candidate by white men? Is there resistance to Hillary?" Borger replied: "...I think the answer is yes and yes." The facts demonstrate otherwise. In the Democratic primary white men have been the most willing to shift between the two candidates. In the two-dozen Democratic primary contests where delegates were at stake, and exit or entrance polls took place, Clinton lost Latinos twice and white women three times (all by narrow margins). Obama, meanwhile, has never lost blacks. It has only been white men who have consistently swung between Obama and Clinton. White men have backed Obama in 10 contests, most recently in Wisconsin. They supported Clinton in 12. More importantly for Obama, the momentum is with him. Obama has won white men in the past three primary races. Yet his strength with white men did not wholly follow John Edwards exit from the race. Obama won the most white men in New Hampshire and Iowa. Nationally, however, Clinton was still holding a steady amount of support. By February, Obama began to overtake her. The Gallup Poll has found that Clinton's support has hardly shifted among white men or women since mid January. In comparison, Obama has improved 23 percentage points with white men and 15 percentage points with white women. Clinton now wins white women by 11 points over Obama. But Obama wins white men over Clinton by 17 points. End result: nationally Clinton went from a double-digit lead over Obama to a double-digit deficit. Obama has captured Edwards and other Democratic candidates' supporters. In a turn of fate, the candidate whom focused on women will have to win more men to revive her candidacy. And her chance is swiftly fleeting. Two surveys out this week by Public Policy Poling demonstrate how crucial white men will be in Texas and Ohio this Tuesday. Even Clinton's husband acknowledged she must win both states to remain seriously competitive. Clinton leads Obama 64 to 31 percent among white females in Ohio, while white men split evenly between the two. In Texas, Clinton leads with white women 50 to 45 percent while Obama leads with white men 58 to 37 percent. Both reflect his recent white male support in Wisconsin and Virginia. The steady stream of Democratic white men away from Clinton's candidacy is forcing her to win a remarkably high amount of Hispanics and white women. That strategy is now failing her. Obama has won 10 contests in a row. The month didn't begin this way. White Men as Swing Voters At the onset of February white males were the sole constituency split between the two candidates (little more than 45 percent support for each). For other groups in the coast-to-coast primary on Super Tuesday, six in 10 Hispanics and white women backed Clinton. Only 35 percent of both groups voted for Obama. Meanwhile, at least eight in 10 blacks have backed Obama. The gender gap for minorities is negligible. In effect, the largest swing vote in this race has been talked about the least. Representation is not conversation. Simply because white men are talking on television doesn't mean white men are being discussed. A Nexis search of the past two months of news transcripts from CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News showed Hispanics or Latinos came up 851 times in the context of the names of Clinton and Obama. In that same context and time span, white male or white men came up 127 times. The central problem with much of the analysis is not that white men are the only group shifting toward Obama. He has improved with white women and Hispanics. But white men have been essentially left out of the Democratic conservation, despite them constituting a larger share of Democratic voters than all Hispanics and blacks combined. That chasm between influence and attention is a bad omen for the political left. Democrats need to narrow the white male gap in the general election. Demographics are simply not changing fast enough to ignore these men, as Democrats have strategically done since at least 1984. "We should have a candidate who actually appeals to white independent men," Obama pollster Cornell Belcher told me in a recent conversation. Indeed. White men are so critical in the Democratic race because they are so heavily represented among independents. On Super Tuesday, white women were 35 percent of independents and an equal share of Democrats. White men however were only 24 percent of Democrats. But they were 36 percent of independents. Within the overall electorate, white men are, by at least 5 percentage points, the largest portion of all independent voters. They are the untold swing vote. White Men, Obama, and the Democratic Past That Obama has proven more capable of winning white men of late, particularly independents, is germane to the general election ahead. Overwhelmingly, the voters who left the Democratic Party in the past half century are white working and middle class men. The outcome of the 2008 presidential race will depend on whether Democrats can win a portion of these men back. "The irony is whether its Clinton or Obama, the big swing group in the fall is going to be white independent men," Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. "I wrote a book called What Women Really Want and I'm the first to admit it's going to be about men." Many political reporters, a good portion of which are white men, have become so accustomed to seeing the world in the constituencies of identity politics that they often fail to identify the constituency that still shapes our politics. And when they do notice white men, reporters all too often get it wrong. The media only recently began to take note of white men after a front-page story last week in the Wall Street Journal. The article correctly explained that many of these white men left the Democratic Party in the Reagan era. Then it erroneously stated that Bill Clinton "won many of them back to the Democratic Party in 1992." In fact, Clinton did not. Exit polls actually show that in 1992 Bill Clinton won essentially the same portion of white men as Michael Dukakis in 1988. It was Ross Perot who siphoned off these men, as well as a lesser portion of white women, and undid George H.W. Bush. History matters because it shapes our conception of the present. Democrats have not competed for white men since Watergate and the Ford-Carter race. But in a year where the Republican Party and its standard bearer remain remarkably unpopular, as a war led by Republicans is out of favor with the public, during a struggling economy stateside, and at the 40-year mark of the Republican majority (no presidential coalition has lasted more than four decades), Democrats have their best opportunity since Carter to regain a majority. Yet that grand Democratic ambition will only be realized by winning more white men. Not Only a Southern Problem Before any relationship can be mended the breakup must be properly understood. The bulk of the white men voting in Democratic primaries are not the same white men who migrated from the Democratic Party in the last half century. Those men left Democrats and took a presidential majority with them. As I discuss my book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, with readers I continually run into one common misconception. It was born of a Paul Krugman column. In it he argued that only Southern white men left the Democratic Party. In short, the New Deal coalition collapsed because Democrats lost hick sexist bigots. Of course bigots left Democrats, but not all of those who left Democrats were bigots. Let's finally put this factoid to rest. In more detail online, Krugman referenced correspondence with Princeton's Larry Bartels on white men. Bartels wrote: "unless you have a peculiar nostalgia for the racially coercive Democratic monopoly of the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to focus on the rest of the country. There, the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote among white men was 40% in 1952 and 39% in 2004." Krugman added: "White men didn't turn against the Democrats; Southern white men turned against the Democrats. End of story." But it was not the end of the story. Soon many of the political left, like Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel, accepted this fiction as fact. Why? It felt right: liberals lost white men for fighting the good fight on civil rights. Therefore, Democrats could feel good about losing. Yet as I have written, even in the South that explanation is simplistic. But the theory that Democrats problem with white men is merely a Southern phenomenon is more problematic. Bartels uses 1952 as a starting point. That was the first year regional presidential election breakdowns were possible with polling. Yet in 1952 both parties attempted to convince Dwight Eisenhower to be their nominee. And for good reason, as the Republican nominee Ike won every state in the non-south. 1952 was an outlier. Bartels missed the real picture. In general terms -- no pun intended in Ike's case -- white men were an unusually low share of the Democratic vote in 1952. That year, Republicans nominated a centrist who was the hero of the Second World War. The result was humiliating for liberals. The GOP trounced Democrats by a striking double-digit margin. The 1960 race is a far more accurate starting point. It was a narrow contest and prior to the modern paradigm shift -- between 1964 and 1972 -- that defines presidential politics to this day. Between 1960 and 2004, Democrats lost 12 percent of the non-Southern white men and 17 percent of white men in the South. For once and for all: the Democratic decline was not merely due to the "Southern Flip." Conventional wisdom is easily born and dies hard in presidential politics. The Other White Man The Southern misconception is often used to prove this blowback thesis, epitomized in Matthews' question. That so many continue to explain white men's vote in terms of "resistance" to a woman or a black man -- especially in the framework of the Democratic race -- demonstrates how deep our biases run with the same group said to be most biased. The Journal article also captured this impulse to assume the worst in white males. One theory floated: because white males are trending toward Obama it proves that they are more sexist than they are racist. If that speculation holds, why were white men initially with Clinton? Prejudice is, after all, a vice of instinct. Like all Democrats -- female, male, black, white, brown -- Democratic white men's first instinct was to be with the frontrunner. But unlike white women, as Obama became more widely known, white men had no stake in the symbolism of her candidacy. Therefore, they were more willing to swing to his electoral coffer. Many of these men casting Democratic ballots today are of the 37 percent of white males who voted for John Kerry in 2004. Yet neither campaign understands exactly how to reach out to them. This is true in part because Democrats have largely ignored white men as a constituency. But if broad swaths of the population like Hispanics or women are a constituency, surely white men are as well. And a look at the 2004 Election Day exit poll provides a telling lesson for Clinton and Obama. Those white men who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 said the "issue that mattered most in deciding their vote" was terrorism (35 percent) or moral values (31 percent). Yet among the minority of white men who voted Democratic, only five percent said terrorism and 10 percent said moral values. In other words, Clinton's muddled stance on Iraq and hawkish stance on Iran was wrong for most Democratic white men. For those Democratic white men, the foremost issue in 2004 was Iraq (26 percent) and economy/jobs (35 percent). Clinton's recent effort to mount a broad economic appeal may prove too late. Clinton failed to consider white men in her strategy. She is reaping that whirlwind today. It is not, however, that Obama's campaign did study these men. His was a broad appeal, less obsessed with individual groups. He reflected the overall framework of the Democratic mind. Therefore he attracted white men sympathetic to that mind. Consider when 2004 voters were asked what issue mattered most in deciding whom to support. White men who voted Republican said they supported the candidate who "has clear stands on the issues" (30 percent), is a "strong leader" (31 percent), or is "honest and trustworthy" (18 percent). This is why I emphasize in my book that "grit" is the value underlying all values politics. This is especially true for the white men who Democrats lost. Meanwhile, of those white men who voted for John Kerry: five percent valued that their candidate was a "strong leader," 10 percent valued most that he had "clear stands on the issues," and nine percent said is "honest and trustworthy." White men, like white women, are not one monolith. Yet in the general election, the patterns shared by all those white men who left Democrats will have to be considered by the political left. Those white males who supported Kerry most valued the personal qualities of a candidate who "will bring about needed change" (47 percent), is intelligent (17 percent), and "cares about people like me" (13 percent). That "change" ranked so high on the list explains Obama's appeal, at least in part. Using education level in the Democratic field, as an indicator of class, also sheds more light on what's occurring today. Those white male Democrats without college educations were roughly three times more likely than those who graduated college to value that the candidate who "cares about people like me." In comparison, those who graduated college were roughly three times more likely than those who did not value that the candidate "is intelligent." White male Democrats who graduated college were also three times more likely to say the issue that mattered most was the war in Iraq, where Obama benefited from his early stance against the war. It is no surprise that they would be more sympathetic to Obama today. Equally, that working class white male Democrats want to believe that the candidate "cares about people like me" certainly explains in part why Clinton has generally held on to their support. It should also startle few that Obama's strategy to leave behind the cultural politics of the '60s and run a post-racial campaign -- when the burden of America's original sin of slavery and racism has fallen on white men today -- appeals to some independent white men. But in John McCain, any Democrat will find a daunting opponent with white men. He is the embodiment of much they admire. What we can say, however, is that the 2006-midterm elections proved that white men are open to supporting Democrats, particularly moderates. It will be this presidential election that tests whether Democrats can turn frustration with Republicans into a new majority. This is why the contest for white men is larger than the Democratic primary. It will not only likely decide the nominee. It may prove a harbinger for who becomes our next president. David Paul Kuhn, a Politico.com senior political writer, is author of the recently published book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.

February 27, 2008, 10:24 PM

Misunderstanding Racism in the Rise of Reagan and Republicans

There has been a fierce debate in recent weeks over racism's role in Ronald Reagan's political legacy and, by extension, the rise of the Republican Party. The argument goes that Democrats lost their majority, above all other reasons, because they would not appease white racists, particularly in the South. Had George McGovern supported tepidly bigoted policies, by this logic, he may have defeated Richard Nixon. History does matter. Considering the reasons behind the rise of Reagan and the Republican majority is vital to Democrats, as they attempt to create a sustainable coalition of their own. Racism was certainly a factor in the GOP's ascension, and a significant one in the South. But it was not the "central" factor for Republicans, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman contended was "undeniable." Krugman, along with others, revived this long-standing debate. A few weeks ago he argued that Reagan's Mississippi "states rights" speech in August of 1980, not far from where three civil-rights workers were infamously murdered in 1964, epitomized Reagan's reliance on Richard Nixon's "southern strategy." Krugman later used Republicans appeal to white men as his proof. It is worth noting, firstly, that if Reagan used a "southern strategy" it was also popular in the North. Several 1980 Election Day exit polls by the networks -- which have their flaws, but are significantly more accurate than the small sample sizes of the American National Election Studies data often cited in academia -- demonstrates that Reagan won 66 percent of Southern white men in 1980. But he also won 60 percent of non-southern white men. Among white women that year, Reagan won 58 percent in the South and 52 percent in the non-South. By 2004 Republicans continued narrowly winning non-southern white women, 51 to 49 percent. Non-southern white men, however, continued to vote heavily for Republicans by 58 to 41 percent. Of course, the white male gap is far larger in the South, where Democrats also lose white women by wide margins. Now this could mean non-southern whites are simply milder bigots. But the evidence paints another picture. "I think what a lot of white southerners saw [by the 1970s] is that black folks aren't so bad, but liberals are," as Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield put it, conveying the conservative perspective. The so-called racially motivated "southern flip" has come to be such conventional wisdom that even our smartest analysts take it as gospel. But as with most conventional wisdom the truth is more complicated. As I write in The Neglected Voter: "The military is most visible and most respected in the South. Southerners register the highest levels of life satisfaction, fully 60 percent, compared to 43 percent of nonsoutherners, which explains their cultural apprehension about reform. The South has the lowest level of unionization in the nation. It has the highest level of gun ownership: 46 percent of southerners compared to 40 percent nationally; among white men, 62 percent own guns in the South compared to 52 percent outside the South. Not surprisingly, the South also has the highest level of church attendance, and ultimately it was the South's Protestant religiosity that was responsible for the first significant Republican southern inroads under Herbert Hoover. Seven out of ten of the largest megachurches in America are located in the South or Midwest, while nearly half of all social conservatives live in the South." None of this means that racism did not play a considerable role in the rise of the modern Republican Party. But the Hoover point is worth a closer look. Republicans first large gains in Dixie since Reconstruction were not in 1968, nor were they even in 1948 when Democrats took up the civil rights mantle. Twenty years earlier, when both parties mostly ignored the plight of blacks, Republicans won half the South. The 1928 Democratic nominee Al Smith was a Catholic running in the Protestant South. But it was more than that. Smith was against Prohibition. The GOP successfully painted him as a big city politician who had little culturally in common with the Southern everyman. In short, the first significant Republican success in the South was based on an entirely non-racial culturally populist appeal. But by the Sixties racism shifted our political tectonics, explaining whites swing from Democrats to Republicans in the Deep South. It was in this time that Reagan first took the national political stage with an impassioned speech on Barry Goldwater's behalf. The conservative appeal would be repeated into Reagan's run for the presidency in 1980. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon reported on that race as it unfolded. He recently challenged Krugman's argument. Cannon recounts an evocative story from Reagan's college days. When an Illinois hotel refused to offer a room to two football teammates who were black, Reagan brought them home to his parents for the night. Yet Barry Goldwater was also not personally racist. Nevertheless, his vote against civil rights legislation and use of "states rights" (a political euphemism for a segregated South in the Sixties) had severely racist implications. Now Reagan was no segregationist. As Cannon and Times' columnist David Brooks argue, piecemealing together racially loaded rhetoric does make for a racially loaded campaign. Ultimately, we know from exit polling and good reporting that Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter over issues of policy and character. Carter's "malaise speech," his inability to manage issues from the energy to the hostage crisis, stood in stark contrast to Reagan's optimism, his clear principles, his promise to reassert America's role in the world and strengthen its military. Reagan also tapped into an emerging counter to the counter culture. He embraced a nascent social conservative movement that was turning on Carter. In 1976, Carter said he was "born again" (a term that resonates most with social conservatives, in the South, and southern white women particularly). By the next election many conservative Christians believed Carter had not stood with them on issues from abortion to the Cold War. So they stood against him, as Jerry Falwell told me in an interview months before his death. Why Yesterday Should Concern Democrats Today A quarter century after Carter vs. Reagan we are still wrestling with the same debate. The lessons we read from this dispute influence how we interpret the present presidential race. We currently are witnessing echoes of the 1980 contest. Many liberals have been admittedly confounded by Rudy Giuliani's appeal to some social conservatives. The political world buzzed when Pat Robertson, an evangelist and contemporary of Falwell, endorsed Giuliani. Robertson said he backed Giuliani because he believed the fight against terrorism was the issue of our times. Robertson and Falwell backed Reagan, who was against abortion but also divorced and no regular churchgoer, to a large degree because national security was a foremost concern in those Cold War days as well. It is impossible with election polling to precisely separate how issues of war and peace, or cultural values, or racism mingle in the mind of a voter. But we do know what came up most in the 1980 campaign - the Cold War, the role of government, the debate over the social fabric of our nation, and competing visions of the nation. All of this complicates Krugman's argument that "backlash" played a "central role" in "the rise of the modern conservative movement." Few fair-minded analysts will argue today that "backlash" did not play a considerable role. But there is a difference between arguing an elephant fundamentally supports itself on one leg instead of relying on all four. If Republicans capacity to win five of the last seven presidential elections was largely due to a racist appeal to whites than the logic goes: as we whites become less racist Republicans are in trouble. But we also know that white racism in 2004 was a shadow of the racism of 1968. Republicans still won both contests. Some liberals, for far too long, have been consoling themselves over the loss of the FDR coalition by arguing they fought the good fight and by consequence inevitably lost their majority -- it was fated in this vein of thought, therefore "A" for effort. But that conclusion has not helped liberals win back their majority. A dispassionate look at why the GOP won from Nixon to Reagan to George W. Bush sometimes reveals the race card. But it also brings forth issues of "law and order," national security, insufficiently addressed middle and working class economic insecurity, cultural populism, and character politics. America lived these issues with stunning similarities over the decades. The Democratic nominee of '68 was painted as "wishy washy" like the nominee of '04 was painted as a "flip flopper." There is a quote I favor by historian H. W. Brands: "The purpose of history is not to make people happy, it is to make them wiser." While Democrats were on the right side of the greatest social movement in American history, that of civil rights, the lessons of history do not always ease the "conscience of a liberal." But those other lessons of how Democrats also lost the FDR coalition will surely help liberals win the illusive majority they have sought for a quarter century. *** David Paul Kuhn, a Politico.com senior political writer, is author of the recently published book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.

December 3, 2007, 9:00 PM