Democratic Primary: Tracking Race as an Issue by Peggy Simpson
March 21, 2008
 Well-educated affluent white voters hold the key to Barack Obama's success in containing damage flowing from the controversial remarks of his former preacher, says David Bositis, senior political analyst for a nonprofit black think tank, the Joint Center for Political Studies.
His immediate take on the reaction to Obama's nationally televised speech on race March 18 is that "people who are neutral in the contest gave Obama the benefit of the doubt but people who are Republicans and Hillary supporters are going to try to milk [the controversy] for what they can, politically."
Three national polls released this week showed Hillary Clinton increasing her lead over Obama; the CBS poll showed that a third of the voters polled had a very negative view of the videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons. The poll interviews were conducted before Obama's Tuesday speech, however, which drew much admiration from many commentators, although less from conservatives.
What will matter, Bositis says, is how the speech went down with Obama's core base of reform-minded, good-government types—voters similar to those who rallied behind Gary Hart, the Colorado Democratic senator in his 1984 campaign for the presidential nomination against Walter Mondale and Jesse Jackson.
"Obama's base is the Hart coalition … of more educated whites, young people and upper income Democrats," Bositis says. They aren't "trust fund babies," despite accusations from a Clinton union leader. "But they are professionals and higher educated. That's why they make more money. They're not the less educated, white working class supporters of Hillary Clinton."
And now, Bositis says, Obama has "virtually all of the black vote in the Democratic Party, which is about 20 percent of the total."
That wasn't in the cards, at the start. His own surveys of black voters for the Joint Center last November showed that most supported Clinton, not Obama.
And, he says, Obama premised his campaign on white voters and "never figured to make race a prominent part of this campaign ... He never intended to bring it up until the Clinton campaign used race and racial themes.
"They're the ones who attempted to make Obama the black candidate even though he wasn't then and still isn't the black candidate," Bositis says.
Bositis contends that "the Clinton campaign brought up race in much the same way a Republican would bring up race, with Bill Clinton associating Obama with Jesse [Jackson] and with [Clinton New Hampshire campaign chief] Bill Shaheen talking about Obama's drug use, with [Pennsylvania Governor] Ed Rendell talking about voters in Pennsylvania who wouldn't vote for a black candidate."
The first salvo came from Bill Clinton's debunking Obama's opposition to the war in Iraq as "a fairy tale," which Bositis says black voters interpreted as "saying that it was a fairy tale that a black man was going to be elected president." This, coupled with Obama's victory in Iowa, a state with few blacks, galvanized blacks to rally around Obama.
"The reason he is winning right now is he has the Hart voters plus blacks," he says. "This is the first time where black voters are actually voting with higher income, higher educated whites."
He says it is unprecedented that race is being used in a Democratic primary.
Not that there have been that many opportunities for that to happen. But Bositis points out that when Jesse Jackson was a presidential candidate, "everyone knew he wasn't going to be the nominee, yet the party had to worry about alienating his supporters.”
And, Bositis warns, "that's one of the problems Hillary has. In making the decisions she's made, on using race in the campaign, she risks making herself unelectable in the general election.
"Black people are very, very familiar with people, especially conservatives, using race in a political way for their political advantage," Bositis says. "Anybody who uses race to attract white support is unlikely to be trusted by African Americans."
Bositis concedes that if Obama is the nominee, the Wright videos probably will resurface in the fall campaign. Asked if he fears they could be the basis for a type of Swift Boat attack that severely damaged the 2004 nominee, John Kerry, Bositis says the kiss of death for Kerry was not those attacks but "appearing in Spandex … of being seen as effete, as 'better' than ordinary voters."
The political ground today is vastly different than in 2004. "The Republican brand is very very seriously damaged. States like Virginia will be in play this time. And John McCain has been getting a free ride right now but he's a very problematic candidate, not the least of which is he's too old to be president."
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