I've subcribed to Newsweek for years. I will not renew. I buy a news Mag. for objective reporting,Fineman,Alter and Wolffes love affair with Obama on print and MSNBC has soured me on all of them.They all belong on Fox,come to think of it maybe Fox is more fair and balanced than them
The Race Perplex
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Far from eliminating racial thinking from politics, the Obama campaign has inevitably drawn attention to the subject—and, looking back, I guess we should have known that it could hardly have done otherwise. In South Carolina (appropriately enough, since that is where the Civil War began) the Democratic campaign divided itself along racial lines, and it has remained that way.
From Iowa onward, Obama has done well among younger, college-educated and upscale white voters. But the heart of his coalition and calculus is the unprecedented registration and turnout of black voters. Sen. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has increasingly retreated into a redoubt of lower-income and older white voters and, in many states, is also relying on an appeal to Hispanic voters that has a racial component to it.
Media analysis, aided (if that is the right word) by exit polls, is more race-conscious (or obsessed) than ever. There are times on television when I find myself blanching at the frankly race-based nature of the discussion. It doesn't seem like progress.
Who made the campaign this way? We are all at fault, especially voters who are admitting that race matters. Those voters overwhelmingly have gone for Hillary Clinton, and while there may be many reasons (Her gas-tax holiday? Her health-care proposal?), it's hard to escape the conclusion that many have done so simply because Obama is black.
The Clintons share the blame. Bill Clinton should never have dismissed Obama's victory in South Carolina as a race-based one, just like Jesse Jackson's. (Even though it was in good measure just that the Clintons should have had the wisdom not to say so. Neither should their main argument to superdelegates be that Obama can't get enough white voters to win in the fall. First, that may not be true—especially if Hillary gets out there to help him. And, while it might seem unfair, the Clintons need to have a better reason. They sound too much like they are fanning the prejudice they claim to deplore and that, indeed, they worked throughout their lives to oppose.
But Obama and his campaign are not blameless. His message from the start was race-aware, if not race-based. He was saying: in part because I am in fact an African-American, I have a capacity for leadership in 21st century America that others do not.
And the primary schedule led him to more explicit appeals as a black candidate per se—the very our-kind approach he supposedly had eschewed.
Discuss