Posted by Jed Lewison on Sat May 10, 2008 at 3:03 PM Pacific

African-Americans and Eggheads

(This will be my last post on Krugman's Friday column -- my other two are here and here.)

Krugman says:

the fight for the nomination has divided the party along class and race lines in a way that I believe is unprecedented, at least in modern times...Mr. Obama appears to have won the nomination with a deep but narrow base consisting of African-Americans and highly educated whites.

Ah, yes -- the "African-Americans and eggheads" theory of the Democratic Party. Let's look at the stats about Clinton:

• In February, 85% of Clinton's support came from whites and Hispanics
• From March-May, 93% of Clinton's support came from whites and Hispanics.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama had a broader coalition:

• In February, 60% of Obama's support came from whites and Hispanics
• From March-May, 59% of his support came from whites and Hispanics

Now neither of these numbers are representative of the Democratic electorate, about three-quarters of which is white or Hispanic. And certainly both candidates would have work to do to unify the Democratic Party. But at least from my perspective, it's pretty obvious which of the two candidates is more capable of putting together a broad multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition to defeat John McCain -- Barack Obama, because he starts with one.

The last thing I want to say on this topic for now is that one of the reasons why Barack Obama has not "gone after" Hillary Clinton's demographic turf is because he doesn't need to in order to win the nomination.

Sure, he could go guns-a-blazin' in West Virginia and run negative ads about the $109 million fortune the Clintons have built, largely on speaking fees from suspect sources, many of them foreign. He could blast her family's role in some of the pardon controversies during the Clinton presidency. He could run an ad attacking Clinton's flip-flops on NAFTA.

But why would he do that? He'd just be running up the score, and what would he accomplish? He'd further divide the electorate, because even though he'd win over many of Clinton's soft-supporters, he'd antagonize her deep supporters.

So Obama has made the smart calculation which is to not engage in a needless and divisive fight. He is focused on November, which is the real prize, and understands that if he presses the fight too hard against a fellow Democratic, we won't be able to reunify in the fall. It ends up meaning short-term pain for long-term gain, a trade-off he's clearly decided to make.