Update, 3/12 7:53pm: The article noted below remains the top entry on the Delegate Hub. It's now been there for at least two days.
For the second time in as many weeks, Hillary Clinton's campaign is promoting a divisive -- and misleading -- race-based argument on "The Delegate Hub," the campaign's official website for making the case that superdelegates ought not follow the results of primaries and caucuses. Today, the lead story on the site is a two paragraph excerpt from a Washington Post article including this gem:
Obama's losses Tuesday in Texas and Ohio...have also given supporters of Clinton an opening for an argument that winning over affluent, educated white voters in small Democratic enclaves, such as Boise, Idaho, and Salt Lake City, and running up the score with African Americans in the Republican South exaggerate his strengths in states that will not vote Democratic in the fall.
Just last Sunday, the lead story on The Delegate Hub offered this "insight":
Obama has won white Democrats in only two states: New Mexico and Illinois.
Maybe Eugene Robinson was right after all. Maybe the Clinton team does think that "to paraphrase Orwell, some states are more equal than others."
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Let me be clear: I do not believe candidates should ignore identity politics.
But they should focus on the positive -- not the negative.
This is a historic campaign. We should embrace that fact.
When Hillary Clinton says "I am thrilled to be running, to be the first woman president" or when Barack Obama jokes about being "a skinny guy with a funny name", it's a good thing.
Neither of our candidates are exclusively defined by their race or gender, but there is no denying that race and gender are important parts of their identities.
And that is to be celebrated. Can you imagine this happening in the other party? I mean, they thought that Mitt Romney was too "different" for them. Mitt Romney!
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There is also no doubt that race and gender play a role in the composition of each candidate's coalitions. African-Americans who have voted in primaries and caucuses overwhelmingly support Barack Obama, for example. White women who have voted overwhelmingly support Hillary Clinton.
There is nothing wrong with that. The fact that most blacks support Barack Obama does not mean that Hillary Clinton is a racist. The fact that most white women support Hillary Clinton does not mean Barack Obama is a racist or a sexist.
These demographic trends are expressions of affinity -- not of antipathy.
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The Clinton campaign's continuing embrace of the idea that Obama has trouble with some demographic groups not only false, it is simultaneously offensive to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- not to mention to the demographic groups in question.
It is offensive to Obama because it suggests that he somehow stands in opposition to that group. It is offensive to Hillary Clinton because it suggests that people don't like her -- they just dislike her opponent. And it is offensive to working class whites because it suggests that they are all a bunch of racists.
Most of all, it is offensive to all of us, because the Clinton campaign isn't just assessing reality -- it is shaping reality.
I don't want to sound too Pollyanna about this; I know there is racism and I know there is sexism and I know it does get expressed in the vote.
But on the whole, racism and sexism aren't the dominant reasons why people vote one way or another.
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Demographic analysis has an air of objectivity, but it is anything but. The application of any demographic analysis has an impact on the very dynamics being assessed.
For example, Sergio Bendixen, a Hillary Clinton pollster said this in late January:
the Hispanic voter -- and I want to say this very carefully -- has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.
At best, the truth is far murkier than Bendixen's claim.
In fact, the reality is that Bendixen's statement is really a statement about the world that the Clinton campaign hopes to create (or at least mantain) and exploit -- for its won political benefit.
It is an example of ethnic and racial division in action -- and it's not the way campaigns should be run. Fortunately, it's not working.
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Given the sensitive nature of this subject, I feel obligated to note that Barack Obama's campaign is not 110% pure on this subject, although at this point any comparison between the merits of his campaign and Clinton's tilts heavily in his favor. Specifically, I'm referring to the memo his staff wrote in South Carolina, not all of which was fair. (Though the bulk of it was fair.) And Donnie McClurkin was not handled well. However, and this is an important point, Obama owned up to his mistakes on McClurkin -- and he has not repeated them since. Indeed, before the primary in South Carolina he specifically condemned homophobia while speaking at Martin Luther King Jr.'s church in Atlanta, Georgia.
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The only time that I am aware of Obama ever saying that Hillary Clinton might have trouble winning over a group of people he was referring to independents and Republicans who supported his campaign. One can debate whether or not he should have said that, but it had nothing to do with race.
Nonetheless, it is also obviously true that Barack Obama's campaign has been race-conscious. One might even try to say he has exploited race, but when he has done so he has exploited our hopes and dreams for unity.
Even if one mocks Obama's emphasis on unity as shameless hopemongering, at least it's shameless hopemongering for a better future.
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The Clinton campaign's ongoing pattern of flogging arguments that depict Barack Obama as unable to win support from white or Latino voters go straight to heart of what is wrong with the Clinton campaign.
Instead of embracing the fact that there are in fact some groups of voters who really like her, they feel compelled to talk about how -- in their view, at least -- Barack Obama just has a problem with some kinds of voters.
Fortunately, by and large that "problem" just does not exist.
If it did exist, he wouldn't be winning the primaries and caucuses, and he wouldn't be on the way to winning the Democratic nomination.
© Jed Lewison