The discussion on race Obama didn't want By: Ben Smith and Avi Zenilman September 21, 2008 10:05 AM EST
When the Democratic primary descended into a charged debate about black and white and Sen. Barack Obama's racially polarizing pastor last spring, Obama took the stage to address the question of race head- on.
"Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now," Obama told those assembled at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center and a nationally televised audience in March.
His campaign, though, didn’t follow his lead.
Instead, his aides have steered clear of any explicit discussion of racial inequality or of his pioneering campaign as they try to woo swing voters, some of whom may be discomfited by the notion of the first black president.
"The best time for a national conversation on race is when he's president," Bill Perkins, a New York state senator from Harlem and early Obama supporter, said Saturday, expressing a widely held view among Democrats.
But the national conversation appears to have arrived. Racial considerations that have long been palpable in southern Ohio and other crucial regions are again in the foreground. A new poll that accompanied a much buzzed-about Associated Press article on Saturday appears to starkly quantify the cost of racism to Obama: 6 percentage points in the polls.
And Friday's debate will bring the campaign to the Deep South and offer the symbolism of an integrated debate at Ole Miss, the scene of a brutal battle over integration a generation ago. That conversation creates a moment with risks for both candidates — though perhaps greater risks for Obama.
Many Democrats see the explicit discussion of race and politics as almost unambiguously negative for Obama, a reminder to voters of fraught questions of identity and a distraction from the economic troubles that have dominated the headlines in recent days and could bury Obama's rival, Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee.
"From [former Los Angeles mayor] Tom Bradley to [L.A. Mayor] Antonio Villaraigosa to [Massachusetts Gov.] Deval Patrick, non-white candidates have historically been successful reaching broader electorates when they've steered clear of identity politics," said Sean Clegg, who until recently was the top political adviser to Villaraigosa.
That's exactly the model followed by Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, who has made a career of electing executives of color. The campaigns he has run for mayor in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, and for governor of Massachusetts have, like Obama's, relied on combining a group's quiet pride in its favorite son with a determinedly post-racial message of hope and unity.
Axelrod’s outlook was manifest at the Democratic National Convention, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s son addressed the crowd, but Obama's speech accepting his party’s nomination, delivered on the 45th anniversary of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, never mentioned the slain civil rights icon by name.
A Republican strategist, Todd Harris, also suggested the country's economic woes could intensify racial tensions in key states. "The tragic irony is that the more the economic crisis helps Obama among some voters, it could cost him as much as it helps in some key states because of heightened racism sparked by tough times," he said.
But if Democrats hope to muffle a discussion of race, which polling and reporting have long suggested is a crucial factor in swing states, discussion of it also carries risks for the Republican nominee. McCain has largely steered clear of anything that could be interpreted as race-baiting, and the Republican Party earlier this year warned its officials to stay on message on the sensitive topic. "They're going to face an avalanche of criticism if they touch the race issue with a 1,000-foot pole," said Clegg.
More subtly, the recent survey findings carry the risk that McCain’s candidacy could be cast as relying on racism. His supporters have objected vociferously to lines of analysis like that of a recent Slate article headlined, "Racism is the only reason McCain might beat [Obama]."
Even the suggestion that McCain's campaign is reliant on racism could alienate some voters.
"There are a lot of suburban moderates who want to turn the page in the biggest possible way from [President] Bush, and voting for Obama gives them a chance to not only make history, but to prove something to themselves about their own evolved feelings on race," said Harris.
Aides to Obama and McCain declined to discuss the impact of the race conversation Saturday, a mark of its sensitivity. And virtually everyone involved recognizes that the impact of race is difficult to predict.
"Some Americans out there will vote for Barack Obama, even though they disagree with him, because they would like to see America move beyond this," said veteran Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. "And there are some Americans who have not moved beyond this."
The campaigns came closest to an open debate over race in late July after Obama predicted the GOP's attack plan would use it. "What they're going to try to do is make you scared of me," he told a crowd in Missouri. "You know, he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
The McCain campaign swiftly rejected any suggestion that it was mining racial resentment and blamed Obama for bringing up the topic.
"Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."
Obama may have stated his feelings, or at least his intentions, most plainly last year in New Hampshire, in the placid waters of the Democratic primary. Then, Time magazine reported, an "aging hippie" asked Obama if he would launch another "national conversation about race."
Obama responded in the negative.
"I'm less interested in a conversation about race in the abstract," he said. "All the self-flagellation, it's not useful. African-Americans get all riled up, and whites get defensive."
Jonathan Martin contributed to this story.
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Racial views steer some away from Obama By: Ron Fournier-AP September 20, 2008 11:48 PM EST
Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.
The poll suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about 2.5 percentage points.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views.
Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.
"There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's only a few bigots," said Paul Sniderman, a political scientist at Stanford University, which partnered with The Associated Press and Yahoo News to conduct the exhaustive poll and analysis.
The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.
The findings suggest that Obama's problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.
The survey also focused on the racial attitudes of independent voters because they are likely to decide the election.
Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.
Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.
On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn't be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites' views.
Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.
Three in 10 of those Democrats who don't trust Obama's change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.
Still, the effects of whites' racial views are apparent in the polling.
Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.
But in an election without precedent, it's hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play.
The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer than when talking to a stranger.
Other techniques used in the poll included recording people's responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks' troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike black people.
"We still don't like black people," said John Clouse, 57, reflecting the sentiments of his pals gathered at a coffee shop in Somerset, Ohio.
Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.
Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.
The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites."
Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn't.
Among white independents, racial stereotyping is not uncommon. For example, while about 20 percent of independent voters called blacks "intelligent" or "smart," more than one-third latched on the adjective "complaining" and 24 percent said blacks were "violent."
Nearly four in 10 white independents agreed that blacks would be better off if they "try harder."
The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.
Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people's votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's backers.
Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton's white backers plan to vote for McCain.
Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes.
The survey of 2,227 adults was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 5. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.
Associated Press writers Nancy Benac, Julie Carr Smyth, Philip Elliot, Julie Pace and Sonya Ross contributed to this story.