Obama’s Color-Coded Campaign
How much “CHANGE” will voters accept?
New York Magazine
By John HeilemannIn a number of key swing states, the percentage of voters who backed Clinton and who said that “the race of the candidates” was “important” in their decision was alarmingly high: in New Jersey, 9; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, more than 11. The writer John Judis reckons, therefore, that in the general election (where the voting population is markedly less liberal than in the primaries) in those states, “15 to 20 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents may not support [Obama] for the same reason.”
What’s clear, however, is that among older, less-educated white voters, there is a pronounced, albeit inchoate, unease with Obama’s “otherness”
The response of the McCain people when Obama called them out on their tactics, saying the GOP was trying to “scare” voters because he “doesn’t look like the other presidents on those dollar bills”: the charge that Obama had branded McCain a racist (when he said no such thing), the claim that Obama was casting himself as a victim. With these ripostes, the McCainians were deploying traditional anti-affirmative-action lingo, painting their foe as demanding, and benefiting from, special treatment.The consensus is nearly universal, and correct, that Obama’s gambit was a tactical mistake: It put him at the center of an argument over race and racism that he simply cannot win—because the argument itself is prone to alienating the very voters he is trying to court.
For many Democrats, Obama’s eventual residence there has long seemed a foregone conclusion. But cast your mind forward twenty years and imagine looking back on this election. Would it really seem strange from that vantage point if the first black major-party nominee—a guy with a thin resume, no foreign-policy credentials in an era scarred by terrorism, a background alien to much of Wonder Bread America, and the full name Barack Hussein Obama—lost? No, it would seem inevitable.
But Not The Guy Below