Progress Illinois

In an article in today's New York Times, Adam Nagourney reported on new polling purportedly showing that racial attitudes remain unchanged by Barack Obama's campaign and that the Illinois Senator is struggling to appeal to white Americans. We even highlighted it in the Early Bird, assuming the analysis was fundamentally fair. But as the folks at Obama headquarters have noted, what Nagourney left out was just as important as what he included. Via TPM, which received a detailed critique of the piece from Obama's press camp:

"The NYT story about their poll ignores multiple and significant pieces of data that actually indicate a trend much different from that which the story suggests."

The campaign offered some "straightforward points from their data" that were omitted from the story. Among these factoids:

More white voters say Obama cares about people like them than say the same thing about McCain by 31 to 23 percent.

Obama's 31 percent favorable rating among white voters is virtually identical to McCain's 34 percent level.

White voters are more likely to say that Obama would improve America's image in the world by a two-to-one margin over the Republican nominee.

Obama is winning by six points against McCain while he only trails among white voters by nine points --- a margin smaller than independent expert on voting patterns, Ruy Texiera, said would give Obama a "solid win."

As Talk Left points out, the key finding in the poll should have been McCain's ties to the Bush economic polices. Sixty-three percent of respondents said McCain would continue that agenda, while only 20 percent said they approve of it.

We've done our part to dispel the rumor that Barack Obama's candidacy will be doomed by his disadvantage among white working class voters -- particularly those in Appalachia. But if you want further proof, look no further than this analysis from Brookings Institution fellow Ruy Teixeira, who co-authored the new paper (pdf) "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class." New York Times reporter John Harwood asked Teixeira how much support Obama will need to generate among this demographic group to upend John McCain. The answer is encouraging to say the least:

Mr. Obama, who leads the delegate count, “is clocking in where he needs to be” with white, working-class voters to win the White House in November, Mr. Teixeira said. [...]

Al Gore lost working-class white voters by 17 percentage points in 2000, even while winning the national popular vote. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts lost them by 23 points in 2004, while running within three points of President Bush over all. Mr. Teixeira suggests that Mr. Obama can win the presidency if he comes within 10 to 12 percentage points of Mr. McCain with these voters, as Democratic candidates for the House did in the 2006 midterm election.

In recent national polls, that is exactly what Mr. Obama is doing. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Mr. Obama trailing by 12 percentage points with working-class whites; a poll by Quinnipiac University, showed him trailing by seven points. In each survey, Mr. Obama led over all by seven points.

“Yes, he has a problem,” Mr. Teixeira said. “But it’s a solvable problem.”

Chicago Tribune public editor Timothy McNulty took to the op-ed page this morning to defend the paper's decision in recent weeks to run two controversial pieces of journalism. First came Kathleen Parker's syndicated column, headlined "The Bubba Vote," in which she attempted to divine America's "patriot divide" using the white supremacist playbook:

It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots.

Some run deeper than others and therein lies the truth of [West Virginian Josh] Fry's political sense. In a country that is rapidly changing demographically -- and where new neighbors may have arrived last year, not last century -- there is a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald described it as "one of the most repellent columns one will ever read." Steve Benen likened Parker's views to those of the nativist Know Nothing movement in the 1860s.  Blogger Hilzoy asserted that those publications who ran the piece "should be ashamed of themselves."

McNulty responds to such objections by claiming: "I would rather see it on the op-ed page so that people can hold it to the light and repudiate the notion rather than deal with it as a whispering campaign." But this notion of Obama's lack of full-blooded Americaness ceased being a whispering campaign months ago! Sure, it started as one pushed virally by conservatives who found the critique more nimble and socially acceptable than explicit racism, but it's a meme that's filtered into our national discourse and has dogged Obama throughout the entire campaign. By printing trash like that in its op-ed pages, the Tribune isn't vetting this point of view -- it's legitimizing it. Parker's toxic analysis has no place in a major, respected publication.

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Nestled in the Los Angeles Times' recap of Hillary Clinton's big West Virginia win last night is more evidence that the Clinton campaign is pivoting away from an argument based on electoral math to one that emphasizes her purported appeal to white voters:

But Clinton is no longer resting her candidacy on the delegate count. She hopes to persuade party leaders, who hold the balance of power, that she would be the more electable candidate against McCain, based on her support among white, blue-collar voters who have not embraced Obama's candidacy in the same way as black, more affluent and better-educated voters.

"The White House is won in the swing states, and I am winning the swing states," Clinton said Tuesday night.

However, Talking Point Memo's Greg Sargent flags a new Quinnipiac poll that undermines Clinton's argument that Obama's relative lack of support from working class white voters will be a fatal flaw in the general election. The survey finds that both Hillary and Barack trail John McCain by an identical seven-point margin among white voters with no college experience.

As Daily Kos' DHinMI has convincingly argued, Obama struggles in Appalachia -- not among the white populace at large. In fact, Obama and Clinton trail McCain among all white voters by seven points as well, which would be an improvement over recent Democratic nominees. Josh laid out those figures in a recent post:

In 2000, Gore lost to Bush among white voters by 13 percent. In 2004, Kerry lost among this demographic by 17 percent. Bill Clinton also lost the overall white vote in his successfull 1992 and 1996 campaigns, but by much slimmer margins. However, he didn't really attract a greater share of the white electorate than his Democratic successors; rather, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole won a lesser percentage, thanks to Ross Perot.

If you combine those numbers with the probable rise in turnout among black voters and young voters of all races, Obama doesn't look nearly as vulnerable as the Clinton campaign would have us believe.

Since the Pennsylvania primary, the Clinton campaign has succeeded in getting the media -- particularly the cable news talking heads -- to adopt an extremely flawed narrative: that her success among white working class voters in battleground state primaries calls into question Barack Obama's electability in the general election. The resulting conventional wisdom is that Obama has a "problem" with white voters.

Well, as we and numerous others have noted, using demographic voting trends from the Democratic primary as evidence of how either candidate would perform among certain groups in the general election is utterly nonsensical.

But more importantly, national polling data simply doesn't back up the claim that Obama should be concerned about his appeal among the white electorate. In fact, the data suggests the exact opposite: that Clinton may have a problem with black voters.

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Today marks 40 years since Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. In commemoration of this solemn anniversary, The American Prospect's Kai Wright penned a thoughtful essay about the civil rights leader's forgotten, radical legacy:

His "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is in fact a blunt rejection of letting the establishment set the terms of social change. "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he wrote, later adding, "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

Shame that quotation rarely makes it into the sort of King remembrances that will mark today's 40th anniversary of his assassination. Generations after the man's murder, our efforts to look back on his life too often say more about our own racial fantasies and avoidances than they do about his much-discussed dream. And they obscure a deeply radical worldview that remains urgently important to Americans' lives. Today, I don't mourn King's death so much as I do his abandoned ideas.

We're as guilty of this tendency here in Chicago as anywhere else; we name colleges and streets after the civil rights legend, but forget his denunciations of racism, materialism, and militarism.

Our inability to break down patterns of residential segregation is perhaps the most obvious and frustrating example of this tendency.

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