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Obama seeks to settle racial doubts
Democrat argues the case that a black candidate can win the White House
 Jim Cole / AP Barack Obama speaks Sunday in Manchester, N.H. to New Hampshire Democrats celebrating their election sweep. |
Signaling that he knows this worry is on some Democrats’ minds, Obama addressed the issues of skin color and identity during his tour of New Hampshire last weekend.
Obama included a line in his speech in Portsmouth, N.H. which he didn’t use in speeches I saw on the campaign trail in Minnesota and Pennsylvania in October.
He recalled Sunday that when he successfully ran for the Senate in Illinois two years ago, he was well-received in downstate Cairo, Ill., a city which had been racially segregated in the late 1960s and which used to have a white separatist White Citizens’ Council.
“Southern Illinois is the South,” Obama explained to an audience of Yankees in Portsmouth, N.H. “It’s closer to Little Rock or Memphis than it is to Chicago.”
In the 1960s, Cairo was “the site of some of the worst racial violence of any place in the nation, as bad as anything going on in Mississippi or Alabama,” Obama said.
Some Illinois Democrats, he recalled, were worried in 2004 that a black candidate from Chicago named Obama was “not going to sell downstate.”
'A black guy born in Hawaii'
He said if somebody had told Illinois Democrats 30 years ago that some day “a black guy born in Hawaii with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, named Barack Obama” would be welcomed in southern Illinois, “nobody would have believed” it possible.
It is true that in the 2004 election Obama did carry some traditionally Republican counties in southern Illinois which President Bush also won.
Cairo is located in Democratic-leaning Alexander County. There Obama got 66 percent of the vote, compared to 52 percent for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
But there is one problem with Obama’s suggestion that his 2004 victory proves that he can win in “southern” places which once were racially segregated.
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In 2004 the Republican Senate candidate in Illinois, Jack Ryan, was forced out of the race due to tawdry details of his divorce being made public. With only three months until Election Day, the Republican Party in Illinois substituted Alan Keyes, the social conservative orator who wasn’t even living in Illinois at the time.
Keyes’s conservative views and eccentric persona proved to be unpalatable to Illinois voters: he got only 27 percent of the vote.
Keyes, by the way, is also an African-American. So Obama did not prove in 2004 that he can defeat a white candidate in a general election.
Assessing Harold Ford's loss
In New Hampshire last weekend Obama also made a point of arguing that “I don’t think Harold Ford lost because of his race.”
Ford, an African-American, was the Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee who was defeated by Republican Bob Corker.
“I thought that the Harold Ford election showed enormous progress. Something that hasn’t been noted is the fact that Harold Ford did better among white voters than the polls would have indicated,” said Obama.
He noted that when black candidates Doug Wilder and Tom Bradley ran for governor of Virginia in 1989 and California in 1982, respectively, pre-election polls predicted that each would get a higher share of white voters than they in fact won on Election Day.
Ford “actually surpassed what the polls would have indicated. That, I think, points to the progress we have made,” Obama told reporters Sunday.
One school of thought among Democrats holds that Obama’s racial identity won’t matter.
Veteran New Hampshire Democratic activist Mary Rauh who was at Obama’s book-signing in Portsmouth last weekend, said of the racial issue, “I don’t think it’s enough of a burden with enough people to matter; and I think the converse may be true.”
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