The Politico: Obama's racial problems transcend Wright
By: Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris
March 19, 2008
Barack Obama’s plunge into the race issue in Philadelphia on Tuesday at times sounded more like a sermon than a speech. But beneath the personal anecdotes and historical allusions, it was a delicately crafted political statement — one that makes clear that Obama understands exactly how much peril he is facing. Even before the Jeremiah Wright controversy erupted in recent days, voting patterns in several states made clear — for all the glow of Obama’s reputation as a bridge-builder — how uneven his record really is when it comes to transcending deep racial divides. The Philadelphia speech offered lines calculated to reassure all the groups with which he is most vulnerable.
For working-class whites — whose coolness toward Obama helped tilt Ohio to Hillary Rodham Clinton — Obama spoke with understanding about why they dislike busing and affirmative action. “Like the anger in the black community, these resentments aren’t always shared in polite company,” he said. For Hispanics, who have sided with Clinton in the vast majority of states this election, he lashed pundits scouring polls for signs of tension between “black and brown” and said the two communities face a common heritage of discrimination and inadequate public services. Finally, Obama sought to connect with white Jewish voters — potentially one of the rawest nerves of all amid the Wright controversy — denouncing those blacks who see “the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
It will take weeks, at least until the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, to know whether all of Obama’s political and cultural base-touching succeeded. Even before that verdict arrives, the speech counts as a remarkable event — most of all for the specificity with which Obama discussed racial attitudes and animosities that politicians usually prefer to leave unmentioned....
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The Wright uproar showed that there is no way to sneak race and ideology through customs, blinding skeptics with his life story and phrase-making. The candidate will need to address these volatile topics directly. But this was becoming clear even before the Wright story caught fire. It is true that Obama won a majority of white voters — a precedent-shattering achievement for a black presidential candidate — in an array of states like Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Virginia. But many of his recent victories came when he got the better end of highly polarized voting patterns. He lost the white vote, sometimes by gaping margins in states like Alabama (whites went 72 percent for Clinton to Obama’s 25 percent), Maryland (52 percent to 42 percent) and Louisiana (58 percent to 30 percent). He compensated only with overwhelming support by black voters.
In Ohio, it was Clinton who benefited from the racial pattern in the voting. She took 64 percent of the white vote, according to exit polls. That was easily enough to offset his 87 percent of the black vote. Overall, she won the state by 8 percentage points. This result could haunt Obama. The past two general elections were tipped by narrow GOP victories in Ohio and these rural whites are a prototypical swing bloc in elections stretching back decades. Obama failed to win more than 35 percent of the vote in 11 of the 12 rural counties that border Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Obama’s cross-racial and even cross-partisan support has been driven by a belief that he is a new-era politician, not defined by the grievances and ideological habits of an earlier generation. Then came Wright....
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=C4050877-3048-5C12-00B3629CC5E2426C
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