Hillary and the Loss of the Black Vote
How do you go from widespread popularity to losing an entire constituency? It takes a village.
2008-03-14
By Brian Gilmore

"I'm sorry if anyone was offended. It certainly was not meant in anyway to be offensive.”
- Hillary Clinton

At a recent forum sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a federation of 200 black owned community newspapers across the country, Hillary Clinton apologized for her husband’s statements during and after the South Carolina primary. Weeks before, as Barack Obama continued to win primary after primary, Senator Clinton traveled to New Orleans and also apologized at Tavis Smiley’s “State of the Race” weekend event. It was late in the evening on a Saturday night, on C-SPAN so hardly anyone noticed. Black America especially didn’t.

At this point, Hillary Clinton is trying to simply stop the bleeding relating to her loss of the black vote over the last four months. The numbers make the loss of support for Howard Dean four years ago look miniscule. Never, in recent memory, has a candidate lost a single constituency in such a dramatic fashion so fast. The equivalent of this sea change in support would be white Evangelicals in 2004 suddenly switching their support from President Bush to some other candidate.

But this is more dramatic. Last week in the Democratic Party’s Mississippi primary, Senator Barack Obama won 91 percent of the black vote. In Virginia, a few weeks ago he won 90 percent of the black vote.  These numbers were achieved before Geraldine Ferraro again invoked race into the campaign by stating repeatedly that Barack Obama is winning because he is black.

Hillary Clinton was in the driver’s seat with the black vote and has fumbled it away. Last year at this time, Hillary Clinton had a commanding lead in the primaries and was well ahead among black voters as well. Millions of black people were asking: Who is Obama? When they learned his mother was white, his father was from Kenya, and his African ancestors were not enslaved in

America, many said he wasn’t black enough, that he didn’t have the proper pedigree as an Alex Haley African-American.

Back then, Hillary Clinton played the game well too. She quietly courted the black vote, played her black political friends from back in the day close, avoided any crazy statements that focused upon Obama’s race. She enjoyed the support of Black Democrats 3 to 1 over Obama, and “four out of five of black Democrats” viewed her favorably.” Only a little more than half viewed Obama favorably.
Yet, she clearly overestimated the depth of her support in Black America. Black America’s affection, she should have recognized, was for her husband, Bill Clinton. This does not necessarily transfer over to her automatically. Nor did it necessarily transfer to Al Gore back in 2000.

Black Americans, as many have forgotten, were lukewarm about Gore when the primaries approached. Spike Lee famously stated on the Charlie Rose Show that he wasn’t “feeling” Gore and might vote for Bill Bradley. Gore had the support of two thirds of African-Americans at the time but he had to work at it, he had to act like he wanted their vote.

When Bradley gathered celebrity endorsements from actors, Samuel Jackson and Laurence Fishburne, at the behest of Lee, it was clear that despite Gore’s pedigree as Clinton’s VP,  that didn’t necessarily mean he would get the black vote.  To his credit, Gore didn’t act like it either even though he had an admirable track record of working in Congress on African-American issues – more admirable than Bradley’s in fact.

Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, she doesn’t have that much of a track record either, her husband does but Hillary Clinton’s other problem is she has been essentially removed from the “black community” of America for most of the last 20 years. She was First Lady in the White House and then a U.S. Senator. These positions do not bring you down to where the “grassroots” black people toil for their lives each day.

She is not from the deep South like her husband, has never been associated in anyway with black culture and traditions, and comes across, for the most part as Chicago born, affluent, white, and someone who went to the best schools and colleges and rarely had to ever consider how it felt to be a black person. She also has been accused more than once of adopting black speech patterns at black events. If you are white and privileged, this is, for the most part, oratorical heresy.

In hindsight, Hillary Clinton should have taken a more grassroots approach.  Forget about seeking the support of aging civil rights leaders and out of touch African-Americans in Congress; seek real support from black people who deal with the black community everyday and know their problems. This could have been well placed community leaders, black people who run smaller, local governments, and successful black business people at the grassroots level. The Congressional Black Caucus is not Black America. The Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem isn’t either. The NAACP probably isn’t as well. Go and find ordinary people living ordinary lives.

But most of all, when the Clintons traveled to South Carolina, they should have stayed as far away from the race issue as possible and especially not enlisted other black people to go after one of their own.

If anything Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton could have defused the black issue and held onto black support by speaking well of Barack Obama rather than attacking him. Show some respect to the people who have shown you love. Black people, quiet as it is kept, still have doubts he can win.

But here was a rising star, a young man that millions of black people see each day and smile. Like Tiger Woods, he might be downplaying his race, but he was black and he was soaring to heights unheard of just a few years ago.

With all the despair in Black America, images are essential now. The Clintons threw garbage at that image and enlisted others to do the same. This choice could prove to be their political funeral.

Brian Gilmore is an attorney and a writer based in Washington, D.C.