It's Not Race, It's Arugula
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:45:13 -0700 (PDT)
It's Not Race, It's Arugula
Obama's real electoral challenge.
by Noemie Emery
06/23/2008, Volume 013, Issue 39
On the way to his rendezvous with destiny, Barack Obama consistently
lost white voters, especially of the middle and working classes, to
Hillary Clinton--voters variously known as Appalachians or Reagan
Democrats, rural voters and white ethnics in the industrial states.
Because of this, he lost most of the big swing states that a Democrat
needs--Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia (which would have made
Gore president in 2000 had he won there), that last by a staggering 41
points. Heading into the general election, in which the weight of the
black vote will shrink as compared to its importance in the Democratic
primaries, this weakness emerged as the prime threat to his promising
candidacy and gave birth to two schools of thought on its cause.
School number one thinks it reflects racial hostility that Obama's
opponents--first Hillary Clinton and now John McCain and the
Republican party--are doing their best to rub raw. This is a case that
Democrats have been making for the past 30-plus years, and its most
recent airing came in a long piece in the May 19 Newsweek by Evan
Thomas and Richard Wolffe. "The real test is yet to come," they
warned. "The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters
since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower-
and-middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student
radicals and blacks rioting. The 2008 race may turn on which party
will win the lower and middle-class whites in industrial and border
states--the Democrats' base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but
'Reagan Democrats' in most presidential elections since then. It is a
sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as 'the other'--as a
haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots."
In this view--let us call it the Newsweek Doctrine--race is the issue,
and the big years in history were 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon B.
Johnson did the Right Thing, signing the Civil Rights and Voting
Rights Acts, and consigning his party to electoral darkness by losing
the South for the next several eons. By these lights, bigotry and fear
are the main factors, and all the others are thinly masked surrogates
for them. If Obama loses, this will be the excuse of the campaign and
of the press that supports it.
The second school of thought admits the presence of bias as a
contributing factor, but not the most important one. The real cause,
it thinks, is a cultural divide among whites that splits them on
matters of worldview and attitude into hostile and competing camps.
Let us call this rival approach the Barone Manifesto, after its
author, political analyst Michael Barone, who crunched the poll
numbers for Obama's primary battles with Hillary Clinton and
discovered that while the former did exceedingly well with white
voters in university towns and state capitals, he did poorly almost
everywhere else. From this, Barone broke the electorate down into two
large divisions--academics and state employees who live in these
places, whom he calls Academicians, and Jacksonians, who live
elsewhere, especially in the regions close to the Appalachian
mountains.
While the term Academician explains itself, Jacksonian comes from
Andrew Jackson, the first of the Democrats' warrior heroes (with an
echo perhaps of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who seems now to have
been one of the last). The Barone view is a close cousin to that of
political reporter Ronald Brownstein, who identified a split in the
Democratic party's candidates between those he described as "warriors"
and "priests." In this reading of history, the critical year would be
1968, when the Democrats splintered on crime and security issues, and
afterwards became the party of peace (and/or appeasement), of moral
equivalence, and of aversion to force. In this reading, the
Jacksonians or warriors reject Obama less because he is black than
because he is a priest or academician, and they see him as "the other"
not because of his name or his background but because of his ideas.
"Academics and public employees . . . love the arts of peace and
hate the demands of war," Barone tells us. "Jacksonians, in contrast,
place a high value on the virtues of the warrior, and little value on
the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian
David Hackett Fischer's phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People
should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of
honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware."
The divisions between these two classes tend to be deep. Academicians
traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise.
Jacksonians prefer men of action, whose achievements are tangible.
Academicians love nuance, Jacksonians clarity; academicians love
fairness, Jacksonians justice; academicians dislike force and think it
is vulgar; Jacksonians admire it, when justly applied. Each side tends
to look down on the other, though academicians do it with much more
intensity: Jacksonians think academicians are inconsequential, while
academicians think that Jacksonians are beneath their contempt. The
academicians' theme songs are "Kumbaya" and "Imagine," while
Jacksonians prefer Toby Keith:
Well, a man come on the 6 o'clock news
Said somebody's been shot, somebody's been abused
Somebody blew up a building,
Somebody stole a car,
Somebody got away,
Somebody didn't get too far,
Yeah, they didn't get too far
Justice is the one thing you should always find.
You got to saddle up your boys,
You got to draw a hard line.
When the gun smoke settles, we'll sing a victory tune,
We'll all meet back at the local saloon.
We'll raise up our glasses against evil forces,
Singing "Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses."
Academicians don't think "evil forces" exist, and if they did, they
would want to talk to them. This, and not color, seems to be the
divide.
In their glory days (i.e., when they had a semi-permanent lease on the
White House), the Democrats frequently sported a veneer of priesthood,
but it covered a Jacksonian heart. In the beginning, Woodrow Wilson
was "too proud to fight," a stance that enraged Franklin (and
Theodore) Roosevelt, but in the end Wilson led his country into world
leadership, and into the "war to end wars." FDR in his turn was a
relentless hot warrior. Harry S. Truman--a Jacksonian, if ever there
was one--bombed Japan back into the Stone Age and later drew two lines
in the sand (in Berlin and Korea) against Communist powers, moves
fervently backed by Congressman Kennedy, who later became JFK.
Kennedy, a millionaire's son who took to the great country houses of
England like a duck takes to water, scored his breakthrough primary
win in, yes, West Virginia, when he sent Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.
into the state to contrast his war record--and that of his brother,
who died on a suicide mission--with Hubert Humphrey's draft deferment
during World War II. Kennedy had no trouble in winning Jacksonians.
Roosevelt and Kennedy were children of privilege who had passed
through prep schools and Harvard but stayed in touch with their
warrior side. In fact, so completely were Democrats linked to saber-
rattling and assertion of power that as late as the 1976 election Bob
Dole, a wounded World War II combat veteran, was still complaining of
"Democrat wars."
It was when they lost their warrior edge that Democrats started losing
the White House, winning only in unusual circumstances such as the
Watergate scandal or in that brief window in history (from the fall of
the Berlin Wall through September 11) when foreign threats had faded
out of the picture. Reagan Democrats did resent post-1968 liberal
activism--and racial preferences and busing much more than the
original Civil Rights measures--but they also were drawn to the
muscular foreign policy, democracy promotion, and unabashed patriotism
of the FDR-HST-JFK line. When these were picked up by Ronald Reagan--
who was himself an FDR fan and the very prototype of the Reagan
Democrat--they quite willingly followed his lead into his new
political bailiwick. When academicians insist that Republicans use
fears about race and other cultural flashpoints to blind middle and
lower class voters to what they call their "real interests," they
forget that to most voters defense and security are often the most
"real" issue of them all.
This neglect often leads to a reading of history that aligns rather
poorly with the facts. It is true that Johnson lost the South in 1964
to the Civil Rights issue, but he also won almost everything else on
the table. And when the Democrats fell apart in the 1968 cycle, it
owed more to Vietnam and rioting students than anything else. They
lost again four years later on "acid, amnesty, and abortion," but also
through an isolationist nominee who ran on a platform of
nonintervention and retreat in foreign affairs. Democrats won both the
South and the White House in 1976 with a southern governor known as an
integrationist but also as a social conservative and an ex-naval
officer--a résumé that later looked misleading after the Soviet Union
invaded Afghanistan, and Iran took over the American Embassy with
shockingly little resistance on his part. After 1968, Democrats would
win and lose for a number of reasons, none of which seemed to touch on
their civil rights stances, which did not seem to vary. On the other
hand, it appears indisputable that, both before and after the Civil
Rights battles, Democrats lost when they put up an anti-Jacksonian,
who seemed both weak and too wordy in foreign affairs.
Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' first major anti-Jacksonian, lost
twice by large margins to General Eisenhower, the man who freed
Europe. Following him, academicians such as Gary Hart, Bill Bradley,
and "Clean Gene" McCarthy couldn't even get nominated, and the
Massachusetts duo of Michael Dukakis and John Kerry--who in 1983 ran
and served on the same ticket--lost to two Texans named Bush. Kerry, a
decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, lost partly because other vets
ran ads that showed him testifying before Congress as a shaggy-haired
antiwar activist. Dukakis sealed his fate in the second presidential
debate when, asked if he would support the death penalty if his own
wife had been raped and murdered, he bloodlessly said no, and talked
about his antidrug program. No less Jacksonian answer has ever been
uttered.
As a political type, Barack Obama is not Middle America's idea of a
"black" candidate, wholly unlike Al Sharpton (who ran briefly in 2004)
or a demagogue such as Jesse Jackson, who put the fear of God into
Democratic leaders when he won the Michigan caucuses in 1988. But he
is beyond doubt the Academician Incarnate, heir to all of the (white)
priests before him. Even some of his more notable missteps recall the
gaffes that they made in the past. His complaint in Iowa about the
high price of arugula at Whole Foods (an expensive grocery chain much
favored by trendies) recalled Michael Dukakis's advice to Iowa farmers
that they grow Belgian endive; his faux pas at a fundraiser at a
millionaire's pad in San Francisco about small town residents of
Pennsylvania who cling to God and guns out of sheer desperation
recalled the "joke" told by Gary Hart in the 1984 cycle about toxic
wastes in New Jersey while at a millionaire's pad in L.A.
"Priests . . . write books and sometimes verse," according to
Brownstein, and indeed, Obama wrote two of them. "They observe the
campaign's hurly-burly through a filter of cool, witty detachment.
Their campaigns become crusades, fueled as much by an inchoate longing
for a 'new politics' as tangible demands for new policies," and
indeed, Obama's main theme, which has listeners swooning, is an
inchoate though inspiring mantra of "change." "Obama is not at all a
warrior, and is something of an academic," writes Barone:
He is all college campus and not at all boot camp. He has campaigned
consistently as an opponent of military action in Iraq. His standard
campaign statements on Iraq seem to suggest that all honor should go
to the opponents of the war and none to the brave men and women who
have waged it. He clearly lacks the military expertise of John McCain
or Hillary Clinton, both diligent members of the Senate Armed Services
Committee. Like another eloquent little-known Illinois politician who
emerged suddenly as an attractive presidential candidate, Adlai
Stevenson, he seems more comfortable with the language of diplomacy
and negotiation than with the words of war. Like Stevenson, he speaks
fluently and often eloquently but does not exude a sense of command.
He is an interlocutor, not a fighter. His habit of stating his
opponents' arguments fairly and sometimes more persuasively than they
do themselves has been a political asset among his peers and press but
not among Jacksonians, who are more interested in defeating than in
understanding their enemies.
And he is up against John McCain, a true Jacksonian if ever there was
one. Of course, he dispatched another Jacksonian in Hillary Clinton,
who, against all expectations, emerged as a lower-to-middle-class
spokesman, and all-purpose warrior queen. As a feminist and graduate
of Wellesley and Yale, she was an unlikely choice to appeal to
Jacksonians, but she won them over by her grit and tenacity and her
stubborn refusal to give in to pressure. Like McCain, she gave the
impression that she would never stop fighting, while Obama, as Barone
puts it, gave "the impression, through his demeanor and through his
statements that he would never start." Obama may be the first nonwhite
with a serious chance of reaching the White House, but he is also the
latest in a long line of anti-Jacksonians who have tried, and have
failed, to win the office of president. The second obstacle may prove
more formidable than the first.
In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson, the first black candidate to compete
seriously in the national primaries, won the black vote in them by
huge nine-to-one margins, but carried virtually nobody else.
Historically, priest-like white candidates win the upscale white vote
and the students, but tend to do poorly elsewhere. As the first black
candidate to run on the wine track, Barack Obama combines these two
demographics, though to his credit his appeal is nonracial, and he did
not begin to win large tracts of black voters until after taking lily-
white Iowa almost by storm. Nonetheless, it is the addition of the
blacks to the students and upper-scale whites that allowed him to run
better than the Harts and the Bradleys, and his share of the white
vote--and his failings within it--tracked largely with theirs. Does
this mean that Jacksonian voters are holding Obama's race and his
background against him? It's hard to say that, as his problems among
them are no worse than those of other, white, academicians in the
past. Priests such as Hart, Tsongas, and Bradley, Brownstein notes,
"run better among voters with college degrees run well in the
Northwest, the West Coast, and portions of the upper Midwest where
wine track voters congregate. Warriors usually thrive in interior
states such as Ohio, Missouri, or Tennessee, where college graduates
constitute 40 percent or less of the Democratic electorate."
This is the pattern Barone found in Obama's battles with Clinton.
"When I first noticed Obama's weak showings among Appalachians, I
chalked them up, as many in the press will be inclined to do, to an
antipathy to blacks," Barone allowed. But then he went back and
compared the results from the Virginia primary race on February 12,
with those in the gubernatorial election of 1989, in which Democrat
Douglas Wilder defeated Republican Marshall Coleman to become the
country's first black governor since Reconstruction. In the
Appalachian precincts of western Virginia--which border both Kentucky
and West Virginia--Wilder, a moderate Democrat with an air of
authority, greatly outpolled Obama everywhere in the region.
"Jacksonians in southwest Virginia showed no aversion to Wilder. Take
Buchanan County, which runs along both West Virginia and Kentucky. In
1989, it voted 59 percent to 41 percent for Wilder." In February 2008,
it voted for Clinton over Obama by 90 to 9. "Wilder lost what is now
the Ninth Congressional District (long known as the Fighting Ninth) by
a 53-percent-to-47-percent margin. But that is far less than the 59-
percent-to-39-percent margin by which George W. Bush beat John Kerry
in the district in November 2004 or the 65-percent-to-33-percent
margin by which Clinton beat Obama there in February 2008. Jacksonians
may reject certain kinds of candidates, but not because they're
black," Barone concluded. "A black candidate who will join them in
fighting against attacks on their family or their country is all right
with them." And these results in general elections included
Republicans and independents, who are more likely to vote against
liberals, which makes the anti-Obama results from the Democratic
primary voters--who were presumably not moved by the putative attack
machine of conservative bigots--all the more striking. Obama's problem
may be less that he is running while black than that he is running to
be the first Academician elected as president, a category that is zero
for eight in national contests thus far. He is peering into an abyss
not of bias, but a large Jackson Hole of rejection by warrior voters.
And this problem is more than skin deep.
Complicating all this are the disparate facts that the voters most
imbued with warrior instincts--southerners, rural voters, and many
white ethnics--are those most suspected (by Newsweek) of harboring
deep racial bias, and that the first credible black candidate to be
running for president of the world's greatest power is also one of the
least Jacksonian candidates who ever drew breath. The interesting
counterexample of course would be to see a black Jacksonian run
against a white Academician, and if Colin Powell had chosen to
challenge Bill Clinton in 1996, we might have seen this take place.
(Whether the black warrior could have been nominated is another whole
story, as the centrism that would have made him electable would have
given rise to hysterics in the party's activist base.) The charming,
war-tested moderate Powell would have presented a fair test of whether
an ultra-acceptable black candidate could have been undermined by
prejudice. The charming, untested, and left wing Obama will not.
Now let us imagine a different candidate, one who looks like Barack
Obama, with the same mixed-race, international background, even the
same middle name. But this time, he is Colonel Obama, a veteran of the
war in Iraq, a kick-ass Marine with a "take no prisoners" attitude,
who vows to follow Osama bin Laden to the outskirts of Hell. He comes
from the culture of the military (the most color blind and merit-based
in the country), and not the rarefied air of Hyde Park. He goes to a
church with a mixed-race congregation and a rational preacher. He has
never met Bill Ayers, and if he did he would flatten him. He thinks
arugula is a town near Bogota and has Toby Keith on his favorites
list. Would he strike no chords at all in Jacksonian country? Does
anyone think he would lose 90 to 9 in Buchanan County? Or lose West
Virginia by 41 points? For those Jacksonians who would be fine with a
black man in the White House (not as tiny a group as Newsweek thinks),
Colonel Obama is the one we are waiting for. When we will get him is
anyone's guess.
Noemie Emery, a WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor, is author most
recently of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political
Families.
© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.
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