> A big problem with the white votes Obama is getting is a significant
> male supremacist aspect to them. A white vote for Obama is tainted if
> it is sexist. I think the data is implying that there is a significant
> chauvinist bloc in his white votes. I don't recall Dwayne saying that ,
> but it supports his discomfort with Obamania.
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No need to backslide, Charles. I don't doubt that there are male chauvinists
among the Obama supporters, but the older so-called Reagan Democrats, where
you'd expect to find most of them, reportedly favour Clinton.
I think your initial impulse to see his growing support among whites - especially younger ones - as a largely positive thing is the correct one. I see the Obama phenomenon primarily through a generational rather than racial or gender prism, although obviously for some segments of the voting populatiion, the latter two considerations are paramount. But Obama is first and foremost a sophisticated young lawyer - the strata from which most successful politicians are drawn - who has been promising "change", however nebulous, in a more emphatic way than Clinton. This is what I believe underlies his success to date.
If anything, his racial background seems to be more an advantage than a liability. His mixed parentage is exotic for whites, and gives him special entree into the black community, which has claimed him as one of its own. If he were or presented himself as an "authentic" ghetto black, or a politician from that milieu like Al Sharpton or Rev. Jackson, that would be a wholly different matter. But for for most Americans, Obama is Denzel Washington goes to Washington, an accepted part of the majority culture.
A white Baptist preacher like Huckabee has a base in the South and in rural America, but in an electoral matchup against Obama in America's big cities, I'd bet on the hip young black bourgeois against the white country bumpkin any time. So class still trumps race, although of course within classes, all things being equal, it's still better to be white and male. And young. And at this particular juncture, in an America yearning to turn the page, it may matter most to be young and seen as hip, no matter the skin colour.