During last week’s Democratic debate, a CNN reporter asked Sen. Barack Obama if he agreed with the long-standing joke that Bill Clinton was the “first black president.” Obama quipped that he’d have to see the former president, a white man, cut a rug to determine if he’s a “brother.”
Well, on Saturday, some South Carolinians didn’t have to see Clinton dance. In helping to propel Obama to a huge victory in the state’s primary, nearly 80 percent of African-American voters answered that question with a resounding no.
Apparently, Clinton ain’t a brother after all.
That doesn’t mean they no longer have a great affinity for him (maybe they’re willing to confer distant-cousin status). But it does mean that he may be hurting more than helping and should go somewhere and sit down.
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For all of his sharp intellect and impressive crossover skills, he doesn’t understand black folk. He, Hillary Clinton and the entire campaign underestimated the degree to which black voters would eschew the mudslinging and dirty politics — implying Obama was a fan of Ronald Reagan alone is fighting words — and rally around one of their own.
Oh, it’s not an uncommon occurrence.
It happened recently in New Hampshire when women voters rallied around Hillary Clinton. They’d seen her in a debate a couple of days prior to that state’s primary in which she’d been cornered. They’d seen her get misty-eyed in a deli after someone asked her how she was holding up in the midst of such a grueling campaign.
New Hampshire women felt Hillary Clinton’s pain and showed up to help a sister out. Something similar happened in South Carolina. This time, it was more about race. Too bad for the voters because they would have been better served by learning more about where the candidates stood on issues affecting South Carolinians.
And yet the vote for Obama was not just to put Bill Clinton in his place. Black South Carolinians had great evidence (from Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada) that a vote for Obama is more than a mere symbolic gesture on any front. The self-professed skinny guy with the funny name has juice.
And black South Carolinians need somebody who has juice. A lot of residents there are in dire straits. They don’t have time for casting frivolous votes. South Carolina continues to be one of the more racially polarized states in the union. (Politically speaking, it has not elected a black person to statewide office since Reconstruction.)
The unemployment rate in the state was 6.6 percent in December, the third highest in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Poverty is so entrenched in some counties that people are still using outhouses.
When a good portion of the population is living under these conditions, your vote is less about proving a point about race than choosing a candidate you believe will help you tunnel out of despair.
No matter how Obama tries to tamp it down, the race question, the race card, will continue to materialize, even from older civil rights leaders who themselves don’t know how to zip it.
So far, in these early contests, there has been a tendency to try to extract some broader, albeit more positive, meaning about race. Certainly it must mean something when voters in overwhelmingly white states such as Iowa and New Hampshire throw their support to a man of color. Doesn’t that suggest even a smidgen of something about race in America?
Because the race dynamic varies so widely from state to state, we may not be able to cobble together a sweeping race statement for some time yet. Maybe never.
Still South Carolina said something big about the race dynamic there.
Consider this: According to exit polls, Obama received as many votes from South Carolina’s white men as Clinton received. In addition, about 70 percent of white voters said they could live with Obama winning the Democratic nomination.
While Obama received a whopping 80 percent of the black vote, he also received about one-quarter of the white vote.
Hmm, maybe Obama is not only black enough to be the country’s first black president, but maybe he’s actually white enough too.
As proof of this, Bill Clinton may not need to see Obama dance. Proof came in the form of a rather public flogging on Saturday.
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