Time Will Tell
Walking past a newsstand, I saw Obama on the cover of Time, with words to the effect "How The Economy Trumped Race."
This is pretty shameful. The actual story, if Time cared, would be "How The Economy Trumped Foreign Policy." (And if they really really cared, it would be about how foreign policy is actually more important, and how there's no way to know which candidate's economic cures will work better anyway.)
Instead, they have to bring up race. No one else brought it up, but Time--a news magazine, I've been told--has decided thanks to the economy, Barack Obama can win despite all the racism. And if he does lose, we'll know why.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:22 AM
4 Comments:
Actaully I don't think foreign policy trumped the economy. A lot of Obama's support comes from what says about it.
The race thing is infuriating and absurd. If a white male had been in the Senate for three years, without sponsoring any real legislation, he never could have won the Democratic nomination in 2008.
I'm not saying that Obama won it simply because he _is_ black (as if a different black politician would have done just as well). Once he was in the spotlight, Obama was able to demonstrate some real strengths: a great oratorical style, an unflappable confidence that his fans find contagious, and a great skill at redirecting questions to the questions he wants to answer. But he never would have been in the spotlight in the first place if he had been a 46-year-old white male.
This is the way ethnic politics has worked in America from the beginning. In school, I learned that JFK had to overcome anti-Catholic prejudice. Much more recently I learned that he had received nearly 100% of the Catholic vote, but nobody ever told me he benefitted from his religion in that way!
Frequently in the past three decades, the Democratic race has narrowed down to two real candidates: the candidate supported by whites who buy coffee at Denny's, and the candidate supported by whites who buy coffee at Starbucks. Mondale/Hart, Clinton/Brown, Gore/Bradley, HRClinton/Obama. Each time, the Denny's candidate wins the nomination. This time it didn't happen that way, because while Obama's white supporters are the latte-drinkers and Hillary's supporters (for reasons incomprehensible to me) were the Denny's types, Obama added black votes to this mix. This let him win the Democratic primaries in trendy places (Washington State, Minnesota, etc) plus virtually all the southern states. Again, race was crucial to the victory.
Finally, for the first time since the 1920s, the Democratic nominee says nothing about poverty. After Katrina, the media told us we needed to discuss the underclass. I agree. But Obama just says "Middle Class", "Middle Class", "Middle Class". Yet he has the absolute allegiance of the vast majority of the underclass. Why? Again, race is the only answer.
(Btw, I know the "Starbucks" reference is anachronistic for the 1984 and 1992 races, but the point is still valid.)
To Anon--even though his base might support Obama on foreign policy, polls have regularly shown that the public in general believes McCain is better at handling it, while Obama is better at handling the economy. The same polls also show far more people rate the economy as being the number one issue right now than the war on terror or anything else. As I've said, a lot of politics is about being in the right place at the right time. (Or as Woody Allen as has said, showing up.)
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