The Obama racial subtext surfaces in Iowa

Cartoons

Iowa Democrats are, by and large, too politically circumspect to say that they think it would be risky for the Democratic Party to nominate Obama because some voters would be racially prejudiced against him.

Some Iowans insist that race plays no role in their consideration of Obama: “Black or white, it makes zero difference today,” said Kevin Miller, a dairy farmer who went to hear Obama speak in Monticello, Iowa, on Friday.

When Obama, in effect, launched his presidential bid in Manchester, N.H., last December, he made a point of playing down the potential hazards of being a black (or mixed race) candidate in a country where four out of five voters are white.

Story continues below ↓

Reflecting on the 2006 Senate election in Tennessee, Obama said, “I don’t think Harold Ford lost because of his race.”

Ford, an African-American, was the Democrat 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,” Obama said.

When black candidates Doug Wilder and Tom Bradley ran for governor of Virginia in 1989 and California in 1982, respectively, polls predicted that each would get a higher share of white voters than they in fact won on Election Day.

Click for related stories

Obama fires back at Bill Clinton
Democratic 2000 VP candidate Lieberman backs McCain
The battle for South Carolina's white voters

Whether some Iowa voters on the night of the caucuses end up sheering off from Obama due to racial fears is a question that will probably never be answered in a definitive way.

Picking the president: The candidates
Click to visit that candidate's MSNBC page or click the XML symbol for an RSS feed.

John McCain
Barack Obama