Pennsylvania
the state of "virtue, liberty and independence" showed us the issue behind the issues
2008-04-24
By Monroe Anderson

It’s race, stupid. Not the economy, although even 90 percent of those who voted in the Pennsylvania primary said we’re in a recession. Not the war in Iraq, although 60 percent of America knows it was a mistake.  Not the national healthcare, although there are 45 million Americans without any insurance coverage at all.

It’s a matter of race: Hillary Clinton and John McCain are white. Barack Obama is not.

An exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky during Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary found race mattered for 16 percent of those who cast their ballot and that just 54 percent of those Democratic voters said they would support Obama in a general election. Twenty-seven percent said they’d vote for McCain if the first black to become a competitive presidential contender was the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer; 16 percent said they would not vote at all.
 
These disheartening confessions came from the white voters who were speaking candidly.
 
When it comes to the members of this special interest group, who in the past have been called the Silent Majority and then later, the Reagan Democrats, it’s whites only for the exalted position of leader of the free world. They’re not going to vote for a black man, period—no matter how well educated, well-spoken and well-meaning he may be.

He can’t confuse them with the facts on how qualified and competent he is. He can’t overcome the recalcitrant racism, no matter how he approaches them, if even on bended knees. He can’t convince them to vote their economic interests, no matter how economically threatened they are.  He can’t be the president of their America.
 
More than two months ago in a fleeting moment of public candor, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter, said as much: "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate.”
 
Unfortunately for Obama, conservative whites are here, there and anywhere in America.  They’re the ones that moved away to segregated suburbs, opposed busing and are against affirmative action. They’re particularly Republican but unfortunately too many of them are Democratic as well. They’re in Mississippi, where Obama’s inability to garner the white male vote was reported as if good old fashioned racism was his fault. They’re in Ohio where Obama failed to draw a substantial number of the working class vote wherever it happened to be white. And, trust me, I’m from Indiana—they’re definitely there.
 
But rather than calling a snowflake a snowflake, the ingrained racism in the American electorate is now spoken in tongues and reported in code.  Rather than examining the glass ceiling Obama is being introduced to, manufactured controversies run rampant in the presidential news coverage and, in the last presidential debate on ABC, the first 45 minutes of moderator questioning.
 
Obama is judged guilty by association for his truth-telling minister, his radically-left neighbor or his documentable statement that bitter lunch bucket whites cling to their religion and their guns rather than boldly confront the politicians that are engineering their economic decline. 

"Considering his financial advantage, the question ought to be, why can't he close the deal?" Clinton said  on the day of her barely double-digit win, outside a polling place in a northern suburb of Philadelphia. "Why can't he win in a state like this?"

Why can’t he close the deal? Is there something wrong with his electability? Why can’t this black man deliver the knockout punch?

These are the questions the superdelegates are going to have to ask themselves, before deciding if they’re willing to throw the black man, with the most dedicated delegates, state victories and popular vote, under the bus and give the white woman a ride. To do that would guarantee the party’s trip to nowhere.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. He is a regular contributor to Ebonyjet.com.
Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com