Unfortunate Racial Talk Creeps Back into the Democratic Campaign

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 1:32 PM on May 8, 2008.

Hillary Clinton still clearly hopes to make a case to the Democratic Party that she’d be the strongest candidate in a general election, but I have a hunch she’d like to take this one back.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

USA Today described these as “blunt remarks about race.” When a candidate equates “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans,” I can’t help but wonder if “blunt” is a strong enough adjective. (The Obama campaign called Clinton’s remarks “not true and frankly disappointing.”)

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton’s comment was a “poorly worded” variation on the way analysts have been “slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms.”

The remark came the same day chief Clinton strategist Geoff Garin also made a similar case for her electability in rather explicit race-based terms.

Atrios noted that there’s nothing especially wrong with a campaign talking about targeting specific groups of voters, but added, “What the Clinton campaign is doing is saying that Obama has electability problems, and using their support from white voters as evidence of that. That’s a wee bit problematic, and not just because it doesn’t follow logically any more than the other electability arguments such as Obama can’t win the election because he can’t win the primary in big states.”

Quite right.

Let’s put aside the unfortunate wording of Clinton’s statement in which she equated “hard-working” with “white,” and consider the merits of her broader point.

Clinton has done well with white “hard-working” Americans, especially in states like Pennsylvania. But her argument is premised on the notion that White Joe Six Pack who votes in a Democratic primary would rather support a Republican than Obama. Where’s the proof to bolster this claim? There isn’t any.

By the logic of Clinton’s argument, we should also note that her support among African Americans is quite poor, and the “pattern” is pretty clear. Are we to assume that if she were the nominee, those same voters would back McCain over her? That Clinton couldn’t possibly win because she’d never get the support of African-American Dems? Of course not.

Why, then, characterize the race in this illogical, race-based way?

For that matter, Steve M. raises a very important point.

According to CNN’s 1996 exit poll, Bill Clinton lost the white vote (Dole 46%, Clinton 43%, Perot 9%). He lost the white male vote by an even larger margin (Dole 49%, Clinton 38%, Perot 11%). And he lost gun owners badly (Dole 51%, Clinton 38%, Perot 10%). However, Clinton won the popular vote overall 49%-41%-8%, and he won 70% of the electoral votes.

In 2000 — when Al Gore won the popular vote by half a million votes — he lost white males to Bush by a whopping 60%-36%, according to CNN’s exit poll. He lost men overall 53%-42%. He lost whites overall 54%-42%. He lost gun owners 61%-36%. He lost small-town voters 59%-38% and rural voters 59%-37%. He lost the Midwest overall 49%-48%.

I’m not saying these are goals to aspire to. I’m saying it’s a myth that Democrats had Joe Sixpack in their back pockets until that snooty arugula-eater Barack Obama came along, and it’s a myth that they suffer crushing defeats when bowlers and boilermaker-drinkers aren’t on board.

I suppose the Clinton campaign may believe that her primary success with working-class white men in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio suggests she’d outperform her husband and Al Gore, but there’s no evidence to support that, either.