I missed this fascinating article by David Sirota when it came out a couple of weeks ago, explaining why and how race matters in Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign against Barrack Obama.
Since at least the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign’s message has been stripped of its poll-tested nuance and become a rather crass drumbeat aimed at reminding voters that Obama is black. Whether it is former President Clinton likening Obama’s campaign to Jesse Jackson’s; Clinton aides telling the Associated Press that Obama is “the black candidate,” or Geraldine Ferraro tapping into anti-affirmative action anger by claiming Obama’s success is a product of his skin color, barely a week goes by without a white Clinton surrogate injecting race into the nominating contest.
That is one of the twin pillars of the Clinton firewall—a well-honed strategy aimed at maximizing “the Race Chasm.” The Race Chasm may sound like a conventional discussion of the black-white divide, but it is one of the least-discussed geographic, demographic and political dynamics driving the contest between Clinton and Obama. I call it the Race Chasm because of what it looks like on a graph. Here’s how it works.
To date, 42 states and the District of Columbia have voted in primaries or caucuses. Factor out the two senators’ home states (Illinois, New York and Arkansas), the two states where Edwards was a major factor (New Hampshire and Iowa) and the one state where only Clinton was on the ballot (Michigan) and you are left with 37 elections where the head-to-head Clinton-Obama matchup has been most clear. Subtract the Latino factor (a hugely important but wholly separate influence on the election) by removing the four states whose Hispanic population is over 25 percent (California, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona), and you are left with 33 elections that best represent how the black-white split has impacted the campaign.
As the Race Chasm graph shows, when you chart Obama’s margin of victory or defeat against the percentage of African-Americans living in that state, a striking U trend emerges. That precipitous dip in Obama’s performance in states with a big-but-not-huge African-American population is the Race Chasm—and that chasm is no coincidence.
On the left of the graph, among the states with the smallest black population, Obama has destroyed Clinton. With the candidates differing little on issues, this trend is likely due, in part, to the fact that black-white racial politics are all but non-existent in nearly totally white states. Thus, Clinton has fewer built-in advantages. Though some of these states like Idaho or Wyoming have reputations for intolerance thanks to the occasional militia headlines, black-white interaction in these places is not a part of people’s daily lives, nor their political decisions. Put another way, the dialect of racism—the hints of the Ferraro comment and codes of Bill Clinton’s Jesse Jackson reference, for instance—is not politically effective because such language has not historically been a significant part of the local political discussion. That’s especially true in the liberal-skewed Democratic primary.
On the right of the graph among the states with the largest black populations, Obama has also crushed Clinton. Unlike the super-white states, these states—many in the Deep South—have a long and sordid history of day-to-day, black-white racial politics, with Richard Nixon famously pioneering Republican’s “southern strategy” to maximize the racist segregationist vote in general elections. “But in the Democratic primary the black vote is so huge [in these states], it can overwhelm the white vote,” says Thomas Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland—Baltimore. That black vote has gone primarily to Obama, helping him win these states by big margins.
It is in the chasm where Clinton has consistently defeated Obama. These are geographically diverse states from Ohio to Oklahoma to Massachusetts where racial politics is very much a part of the political culture, but where the black vote is too small to offset a white vote racially motivated by the Clinton campaign’s coded messages and tactics. The chasm exists in the cluster of states whose population is above 6 percent and below 17 percent black, and Clinton has won most of them by beating Obama handily among white working-class voters.
In sum, Obama has only been able to eke out victories in three states with Race Chasm demographics, where African-American populations make up more than 6 percent but less than 17 percent of the total population. And those three states provided him extra advantages: He won Illinois, his home state; Missouri, an Illinois border state; and Connecticut, a state whose Democratic electorate just two years before supported Ned Lamont’s insurgent candidacy against Joe Lieberman, and therefore had uniquely developed infrastructure and political cultures inclined to support an outsider candidacy. Meanwhile, three-quarters of all the states Clinton has won are those with Race Chasm demographics.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), a Clinton supporter, publicly acknowledged this dynamic in February. He suggested to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board that Obama’s ethnicity could prevent him from winning the state, which, at 10.6 percent black, falls squarely in the Race Chasm.
“You’ve got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate,” Rendell said.
That was echoed by Obama supporter David K. Levdansky, a state representative from western Pennsylvania. “For all our wanting to believe that race is less of an issue than ever before, the reality of racism still exists,” he told the New York Times. “It’s not that [Pennsylvanians] don’t think he’s qualified, but some people fear that it might be empowering the black community by electing Obama.”
Did Martin die in vain on that fateful day of April 4, 1968? What has transpired in these 40 years with respect to King’s dream? There are several events in the Bible where the number 40 is of paramount importance—can any of them be related to our struggles these past 40 years? Rain 40 days and 40 nights (original flood); Israelites in wilderness 40 years; Jesus in the wilderness 40 days; Ascension occurred 40 days after the resurrection; Pentecost occurred the 50th day; (do we have to wait for another 10 years for The Dream (Pentecost)?). No I have not become a religious fanatic, but these things came to mind in my thinking about the plight of the US today, forty years after the assassination.
The Southern Poverty Law Center recently issued a report about the 888 organized hate groups operating in our country—a staggering 48% increase since 2000 in white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant extremist, anti-gay and other groups. Is this the content of our character? Are we not living up to the dream? Or is it a nightmare?
When the government of the United States lied about the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9.11.01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When the government of the United States lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq being a threat to the United States peace.
When the government of the United States allows the economy to get out of hand and its citizens suffer while it spends 3 trillion dollars on an unwinnable war. Is this the content of our character?
Martin Luther King, Jr said:
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Can we afford to stand by and silently allow this to happen?
40 years after his death what would Martin Luther King, Jr. say about this election season? We have a Black man and a White woman running for the highest office in the land. But as a nation have we shown our commitment to ending injustice, racism and sexism? When the media bashes immigrants, and overweight people are the targets of jokes… Do we pay homage to Dr. King and his dream one day a year and then go back to being a purveyor of violence and hate? Is this the content of our character?
As the ranks of hate and violence swell, people of concern must stand up and be counted.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
(Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963)
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
(Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964)
Moses led the Israelites out of bondage and into the wilderness. For forty years they labored and toiled in the desert. He did not reach the promised land with them. However, they grew in strength, throwing off the shackles of bondage. The Bible tells us they made the final journey to the promised land.
Will it take another 10 years or 40 years for us to rise from the ashes of bondage, hate and violence? And awaken from this nightmare to live out the true meaning of the content of our character?
— Photo: The family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walk in the funeral procession of the slain civil rights leader in Atlanta on April 9, 1968. (AP)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 4, 2008 at 8:23 am
While there is still some attention to Hillary Clinton’s role in the 1990s US foreign policy in the Balkans, I think we ought to be discussing untruths much more significant than her fib about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire.
Sen. Clinton’s other honesty problem this week came with revelations that, while she claims to have been an internal NAFTA critic in the administration, she actually gave several presentations in favor of NAFTA at the time it was passed. But, to be fair, this may not be a deception. People are often called upon to advocate for decisions in public that they opposed in private. The NAFTA controversy suggests other concerns, such as: If she were such a vehement critic, and the administration backed it anyway, how important was she? And, how can she claim credit for the good deeds of her husband’s administration and yet take no responsibility for its problems?
Still, Clinton’s handling of the NAFTA question certainly raises concerns. Especially troubling is her campaign’s work to spread rumors of Obama sending back-channel messages to the Canadians suggesting their anti-NAFTA rhetoric was all talk — when, according to a high-level Canadian source, her campaign had done that.
So let’s go back to some other statements of Hillary Clinton and to some other features of the US military presence in the Balkans.
Last year, earlier on in her campaign, Clinton said
she would limit the Bush administration practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions and would work to boost the performance of key agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she said performed well during her husband’s White House years. “People are rightly disturbed by what they see as the incompetence and corruption in this administration. And that’s undermined confidence in government, which makes it very difficult for us to meet the challenges we face today,” Clinton said.
As she reflects back on the US military presence in the Balkans under her husband’s administration, and on her role in forming and carrying out his policies, Hillary Clinton needs to speak about the Bill Clinton administration’s “practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions.”
In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein observes that Halliburton, with Dick Cheney at the helm, made its first major expansions in the area of privatizing government functions in the Balkans—under Bill Clinton.
In the Balkans, where Clinton deployed nineteen thousand soldiers, US bases sprang up as mini Halliburton cities: neat, gated suburbs, built and run entirely by the company. And Halliburton was committed to providing the troops with all the comforts of home, including fast-food outlets, supermarkets, movie theaters and high-tech gyms…. As far as Halliburton was concerned, keeping the customer satisfied was good business—it guaranteed more contracts, and because profits were calculated as a percentage of costs, the higher the costs, the higher the profits…. In just five years at Halliburton, Cheney almost doubled the amount of money the company extracted from the US Treasury, from $1.2 billion to $2.3 billiion, while the amount it received in federal loan guarantees increased fifteenfold. (292)
Under the Clinton administration, we also saw the privatization of information technology divisions of the US government.
In the mid-nineties, Lockheed [Martin] began taking over information technology divisions of the US government, running its computer systems and a great deal of its data management. Largely under the public radar, the company went so far in this direction that, in 2004, the New York Times reported,
Lockheed Martin doesn’t run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it…. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all of this happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft. (293)
And whom do we find on the board of Lockheed Martin during this period?
The push to expand the service economy into the heart of government was, for Cheney, a family affair. In the late nineties, while he was turning military bases into Halliburton suburbs, his wife, Lynne, was earning stock options in addition to her salary as a board member at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. (293)
So, yeah, I’m concerned about the “practice of hiring private companies to perform government functions”—concerned that new private corporate inroads into government functions were pioneered under Bill Clinton and expanded wildly under George Bush. I am concerned that the corporate takeover will not be reversed unless there is a formal plan to accomplish this reversal. As far as I can see, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has such a plan.
In his Blueprint for Change, Obama champions the return of appropriate government regulatory functions, from the Labor Relations Board to the Department of Justice, but he sidesteps the new roles of private corporations in government function. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has claimed to be a standard bearer for the fight against these destructive economic policies, and it is nothing but a cynical lie.
If Hillary Clinton is going to continue to stake claims on her husband’s presidential legacy, then we should be concerned that she may be as friendly to Dick Cheney’s economic vision as George Bush is.
Great clip from yesterday’s State of the Black Union footage in NOLA (via Baratunde):
If you know some of my other work, you’ll know why I love Gregory’s quote from way back:
“If these Mississippi white Klansmen, who do not know how to plan crimes, who are ignorant, illiterate bastards, can completely baffle our FBI, what are those brilliant Communist spies doing to us?”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 24, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
While there is still some attention to Hillary Clinton’s role in the 1990s US foreign policy in the Balkans, I think we ought to be discussing untruths much more significant than 
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