Common Sense Political Thought

Pam Spaulding of Pandagon has an article up, concerning Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) doing exactly what I said she’d do: make her last-ditch appeals explicitly on race:

White dog whistles no more

Last night in another thread, I commented again about how poorly Hillary Clinton has been served by her hired campaign guns. Of course, the senator has stuck her foot in her mouth on her own as well, but nothing compares to this. From a new USA Today interview, she manages to top any dog-whistle race-baiting that her husband put out on the campaign trail with this naked appeal.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

Wow. Just. Wow. That didn’t blow by without comment, even in the article.

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton’s comment was a “poorly worded” variation on the way analysts have been “slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms.”

Is that another variation on “misspoke”?

You see the problem and beauty of Senator Clinton’s statement is that it boldly embraces the undiscussed fear in this Reagan Democrat demographic, the people who do consider race a major factor — concern that white privilege is being threatened, that somehow Barack Obama as president would exact retribution against “hard working white Americans” for past or present institutionalized racism. You know, like this candid Kentucky voter:

I’ve talked to people-a woman who was chair of county elections last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for a black man.” Patrick said he wouldn’t vote for Obama either.

Why not?

“Race. I really don’t want an African-American as President. Race.”

What about race?

“I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

The frame is specific — that’s why Clinton referred to hard working white Americans. What happened to “blue collar Americans?” Oh wait, there are a lot of hard working black and brown blue collar/working class Americans, and many of them they voted for Obama, so she had to slice that demo down to the bottom line. Dog whistles no more.

Unfortunately, while Miss Spaulding was certainly correct to note Mrs Clinton’s blatant appeal to white voters based on race, she fouled up one point in her defense of Mr Obama and his voters:

Black voters don’t turn out for Obama solely because he is black. I’ve blogged before about this bizarre train of thought — if the affinity vote is so powerful we would have seen a bum rush for Alan Keyes. What Clinton is saying is not inaccurate (polls slice and dice this way), but its use here is inappropriate and inflammatory. It’s because the last core demo left for her to appeal to is resistant to Obama for reasons that have little to do with policy differences, or 3 AM readiness. She’s brought the microtarget out into the light and it’s one many of us don’t want to face talking about, with a different name — scared white people.

Mr Obama is winning more than 90% of the black vote in the Democratic primaries. That, to Miss Spaulding, is perfectly fine, though she denies that it is “solely” because of his race. That’s just plain bovine feces, and she knows it. But while it’s apparently OK for blacks to vote for a black candidate specifically because he’s black, only “scared white people” would choose to vote for a white candidate over a black one because of his race.

The word discriminate means, in one definition, to make a clear distinction; distinguish. In matters of policy, there is little to differentiate Senators Obama and Clinton. Though Mrs Clinton claims to be the candidate of experience, that’s an obvious lie, save to her partisans: she was the wife of a man with responsibilities, not the person with responsibilities herself. And while she’s been in the United States Senate longer than Mr Obama, he’s been an elected official, with a broader range of experience, for longer than she has.

Yet, somehow, for some reason, black and white democratic voters, in discriminating between the two candidates, have come down on completely different sides of the question. It’s very clear: in discriminating between the two candidates, Democratic primary voters have tended to come down on the side of the candidate with the same skin color.

Another point of discrimination apparently is genitalia; the Democratic voters have shown a tendency to vote for the candidate who has gentials which match their own, though Democratic voting by genitals is less obvious than Democratic voting by complexion.

For the Democrats, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable for a female voter to vote for a candidate with a vagina, simply because that candidate has a vagina, and it’s perfectly legitimate for black voters to vote for a candidate because he is black. Yet it’s somehow just wrong, as in Miss Spaulding’s “scared white people,” for male voters to vote for a candidate simply because he is male, or for a white voter to choose one candidate over another simply because the candidate they select is white.

Miss Spaulding’s position is, at bottom, hypocritical, and anyone can see it. When you legitimize taking a distinction between candidates, discriminating, based on race or gender, when such discrimination works for your favored candidate, you don’t get to combitch about it when someone else takes a decision between candidates based on race or gender which works against your interests.