Pirate's Cove

Noemie Emery at The Weekly Standard sets the record straight on Obama’s candidacy and why he is hemoraging certain voting blocks

 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.”

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.

Noemie breaks it down to the basics:

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:….

In other words, Democrats prefer wimps who carry man bags, never open a door for a woman, and eat arugula, while Republicans prefer strong men who take charge, are down home, hold a door open for women, and prefer a steak with regular salad.

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.

Disliking Obama as a candidate is not about his race, but, what he stands for and his policies. Remember, it was Bush who had more Blacks in his administration, such as the first Black Sec. Of State, first Black National Security Advisor, first black female Sec. of State, and many more. Bush had more Blacks on his election team then did John Kerry. Heck, Bush had more females and minorities, too. First Latino Attorney General. And which Party featured lots of racism and sexism during the primaries? That’s right, the one that is not the GOP.

Swiped the picture from Carl.