Will Race Be The Difference November 4?

by Richard Holcomb

In this week's New York magazine, John Heileman suggests that Barack Obama's difficulty in reaching certain white voters could be pivotal, but offers little in the way of solutions. Nevertheless, his analysis of this little discussed but very real issue is a must-read:

"What’s clear..., is that among older, less-educated white voters, there is a pronounced, albeit inchoate, unease with Obama’s “otherness”—one that the McCain operation is moving swiftly to exploit, with what promises to be an increasingly race-freighted campaign. The images in its recent ads are ingeniously coded, and thus easily misread (or denied). The Paris Hilton–Britney Spears commercial, for instance, was interpreted by many on the left as raising the specter of miscegenation. But the real subtext of the ad was to paint Obama as a featherweight figure whose fame is undeserving, the result of “natural” gifts as opposed to hard work or skill. As Adam Serwer argued in The American Prospect, “the ad never mentions Obama’s race as the source of his celebrity, but it doesn’t have to—it’s been part of the campaign long enough for the point to be implicit. In short, this ad is Geraldine Ferraro’s attack done ‘right,’ in the sense that it does not directly implicate the McCain campaign as exploiting racial tensions.”

This sort of appeal is part of a long, ignoble, often devastatingly effective tradition in the GOP—now updated for a more sophisticated, media-savvy, and scrutiny-heavy era, in which overt race-baiting might not play. And so was the response of the McCain people when Obama called them out on their tactics, saying the GOP was trying to “scare” voters because he “doesn’t look like the other presidents on those dollar bills”: the charge that Obama had branded McCain a racist (when he said no such thing), the claim that Obama was casting himself as a victim. With these ripostes, the McCainians were deploying traditional anti-affirmative-action lingo, painting their foe as demanding, and benefiting from, special treatment."

If one is forced to put a label on it, I agree with others who portray this as fostering resentment more than an appeal to pure racism; the results could be the same. Some level of uneasiness about Obama's otherness is endemic, and the McCain campaign is feeding the beast of resentment daily with the double-barreled attack on Obama's alleged lack of experience and credentials to be Commander in Chief. and his celebrity status. As David Gergen has observed, does the word "uppity" come to mind?

Heileman believes that even with record turnout for Obama among minorities and young voters, he will need at least 40% of these white voters to win. That is by no means a certainty.