Pat Dollard | Young Americans

The Swamp:

by Frank James

It’s been said before but bears repeating: If white working-class voters rebuff the entreaties of Sen. Barack Obama, for many of them, perhaps even most, it may have less to do with race than other matters, like the senator’s relative newness on the national political scene or his lack of deep national-security experience at a time when the world seems a pretty dangerous place.

So any ultimate analysis that says race was strictly the reason such voters didn’t vote for him will be inaccurate to the degree that such an analysis fails to mention other factors.

That’s a point well worth remembering and it’s made by Peter Brown in his Wall Street Journal Political Perceptions column.

Brown, assistant director of Quinnipiac University’s Polling Institute, reminds us that Democrats haven’t won a majority of the non-college educated voter since 1964. Race has certainly been a factor for some of those voters in the decades since LBJ’s landslide win over Barry Goldwater. When Republicans like Richard Nixon talked of law and order and Ronald Reagan spoke of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, they used language meant to push racial buttons.

But there have been other issues too, cultural ones, that have often kept working white-voters from voting for Democratic presidential candidates:

For those voters, especially ones without college degrees, the fact that Sen. Obama is black may not be as much a disqualifier as his background as a Democrat from the Frost Belt with no national security or executive experience and a voting record judged by the nonpartisan National Journal as the Senate’s most liberal during 2007.

Yet, the focus on Sen. Obama’s relative weakness among the white working class has become the hot topic among many who say racial bias explains it. Of course it would be naive to believe that race is not a factor in America today. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Mr. Obama’s relative weakness among white voters is solely, or even mainly, due to the fact that he is black and that three quarters of voters this year will be white…

Brown goes on to make a very salient point, that because of the nation’s particular history, whites and blacks more often than not view the federal government’s role differently which is why most blacks wind up in the Democratic camp and so many whites wind up whites in the Republican one.

The truth is that, more than we like to admit, polls consistently show a correlation between race and ideology in American society. White voters, as a group, are more likely to favor a limited role for government here at home and a more aggressive posture overseas. In general, polls show Democrats — and a disproportionate share of black voters — favor a smaller, less adventurous military and a larger role for government on the domestic front.

This disconnect goes a long way toward explaining the GOP White House dominance since 1980.

So there is a racial component but it is more complicated than merely saying working- class whites don’t choose to vote for Obama because he is black.

Yes, some of these voters are racists as are some higher-income, college-educated whites, some blacks, Hispanics, Asians, whatever.

But anyone who makes Obama’s race the sole reason for his problems with these voters is being intellectually dishonest.

An interesting thought experiment would be to substitute Obama for the pre-Iraq War Colin Powell and to imagine Powell now running as a Republican. Would he have the same trouble attracting working-class white voters as Obama? Hard to know, but it seems like he’d probably have more success.