Obama Can Win; If He Does, Let's Hope His Sunny Bipartisan Talk Is Just Rhetoric

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted January 7, 2008.

It's impossible to know if America is "ready to elect a black man" -- a generic "black man," that is -- but there's every reason to believe that it's more than ready to elect Barack Obama if he were to win the Dem nomination.

That's a real possibility -- Obama's sitting in a very strong spot going into New Hampshire. It looks like he's had an impressive "bounce" coming out of Iowa -- polls taken before the caucus still had Clinton with a lead in New Hampshire, but several polls conducted afterwards have Obama up by an average of seven points over Clinton, with Edwards trailing by 18.

What's more, Clinton and Edwards have little choice but to play into the Obama narrative. She's attacked from the right, and Edwards, who has criticized Obama from the left, now talks about being in a "conviction alliance" with Obama (he's trying to kill off Hillary and make it a two-person race), and those approaches allow Obama to sit back, talk about hope and change and look like the new kind of "post-partisan" candidate he claims to be, regardless of whether that claim is grounded in fact.

According to the conventional wisdom, if Obama does end up getting the nomination, his ethnicity and "exotic" middle name would be a major hurdle to winning in November. But that narrative only looks at one side of the coin.

There's been a relentless focus on the question of race. Is America ready? Would the South go for a (half) African American with a name that rhymes with "Osama"? Will people, fearful of being seen as a racist, tell pollsters they'd vote for a man of color and then go against him once they get into the confines of the voting booth? Will the Big Lie that he's a Muslim get e-mailed around to enough "low-information" voters that a whole gaggle of people freak out, get off the couch and head to the polls to beat him?

Yes to all of that -- one should never underestimate the role of race in American politics. But the analysis misses a larger dynamic, which is that anybody the Dems nominate will be Swift-Boated mercilessly, their strong points turned into weaknesses and their humanity reduced to angry caricatures. Al Gore became a liar, John Kerry, a decorated war hero, became a wimp and the next nominee will be similarly transformed into a hideous reflection of him- or herself. As Paul Waldman of MediaMatters put it, "If the Democrats were to dig up the corpse of George Patton and run him in an election, the Republicans would say he was soft on defense and hated America."

In building a base of voters who don't like partisan politics and who may be more likely to dismiss those attacks as being just more of the same Washington "bickering," Obama may end up being, to a degree, insulated from those kind of assaults in a way other, more "traditional" Democratic candidates aren't.

The focus on race also looks at just one side of the ledger -- at an unbalanced equation. Getting far less attention is that Obama has a story, a narrative, that has the potential to bring a whole group of people who haven't been politically engaged in the past into the political world for the first time.

The reason that side is getting short shrift is simple: the political discourse in America is shaped by white, middle aged male pundits who live in the burbs and tend to think of the American "voter" as a white, middle-aged white guy from the burbs. But America is chock-a-block with minorities and women and urbanites and liberals and young people, and most of those groups have voted at historically low levels because they never saw a national candidate who looked anything like them or who had shared their experiences in any meaningful way.

That's not to say that we won't be treated to a bevy of ugly messages if Obama ends up heading the ticket -- some coded messages, some explicit -- designed to appeal to America's uglier, racist side. We certainly will (and already have in the primaries). And if Obama were to become the nominee, he would almost certainly lose in deeply "red" states; in the Bible Belt. But those states aren't in play for Democrats anyway. In his book Whistling past Dixie, political scientist Tom Schaller showed that Democrats don't need those states to win nationally. The book caused a lot of controversy over the question of whether Dems should write off the deep South in the near term, but nobody could shake Schaller's numbers and argue that they couldn't. It's the "purple" states that matter in a national race, and, if Obama's win in Iowa was any indication, he has the potential to dominate in those races.

In Iowa, he blew away the field among voters who identified themselves as independents. He beat Clinton among unmarried voters, 43-24; with first-time caucus-goers, 41-29; among young people aged 17-29 he slaughtered his opponents, with four times Edwards' second place support. He beat Edwards among voters who prioritized the ability to "bring about change" by 51-20.

And I think it's difficult for white people, this author included, to understand just what his candidacy symbolizes for people of color. For a year we heard that the African American community was divided over whether he was "black enough" for them to fully embrace as one of their own. In the wake of Iowa, at least according to anecdotal evidence, black and brown America were profoundly moved to see Obama, this powerful African American orator, winning over cornfed Iowa.

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Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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