Noemie Emery: Obama's real challenge isn't racism; it's elitism

The Dallas Morning News
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008

On the way to his rendezvous with destiny, Barack Obama consistently lost white voters, especially of the middle and working classes, to Hillary Clinton – voters variously known as Appalachians or Reagan Democrats, rural voters and white ethnics in the industrial states.

Because of this, he lost most of the big swing states a Democrat needs – Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia (that last by a staggering 41 points). Heading into the general election, in which the weight of the black vote will shrink compared with its importance in the Democratic primaries, this weakness emerged as the prime threat to his candidacy and gave birth to two schools of thought on its cause.

School No. 1 thinks it reflects racial hostility that Mr. Obama's opponents – first Mrs. Clinton and now John McCain and the Republican Party – are doing their best to rub raw. This is a case that Democrats have been making for the past 30-plus years, and its most recent airing came in a long piece last month in Newsweek by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe.

"The real test is yet to come," they warned. "The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968. ... It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as 'the other' – as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots."

In this view, race is the issue, and the big years in history were 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and consigned his party to electoral darkness by losing the South for eons.

By these lights, bigotry and fear are the main factors, and all the others are thinly masked surrogates for them. If Mr. Obama loses, this will be the excuse of the campaign and of the press that supports it.

The second school of thought admits the presence of bias as a contributing factor – but not the most important one. The real cause, it holds, is a cultural divide among whites that splits them on matters of worldview and attitude into hostile and competing camps.

Let us call this rival approach the Barone Manifesto, after its author, political analyst Michael Barone, who crunched the poll numbers for Mr. Obama's primary battles with Mrs. Clinton and discovered that while Mr. Obama did exceedingly well with white voters in university towns and state capitals, he did poorly almost everywhere else.

From this, Mr. Barone broke the electorate down into two large divisions – academics and state employees who live in these places, whom he calls academics; and Jacksonians, who live elsewhere. (While the term academic explains itself, Jacksonian comes from Andrew Jackson, the first of the Democrats' warrior heroes.)

In this reading of history, the critical year would be 1968, when the Democrats splintered on crime and security issues, and afterwards became the party of peace, moral equivalence and aversion to force. This theory holds that the Jacksonians reject Mr. Obama less because he is black than because he is an academic, and they see him as "the other" not because of his name or his background but because of his ideas.

"Academics and public employees ... love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war," Mr. Barone says. "Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior, and little value on the work of academics and public employees."

The divisions between these two classes tend to be deep. Academics traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise. Jacksonians prefer men of action with tangible achievements.

Each side tends to look down on the other, though academics do it with much more intensity. The academics' theme songs are "Kumbaya" and "Imagine," while Jacksonians prefer Toby Keith.

This, and not color, seems to be the divide.

As a political type, Mr. Obama is not Middle America's idea of a "black" candidate, unlike Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. But he is beyond doubt the Academic Incarnate. Even some of his more notable missteps recall the gaffes academics made in the past.

His complaint in Iowa about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods recalled Michael Dukakis' advice to Iowa farmers that they grow Belgian endive; his faux pas at a fundraiser about rural voters who cling to God and guns out of desperation recalled the "joke" told by Gary Hart in 1984 about toxic wastes in New Jersey.

And he is up against Mr. McCain, a true Jacksonian if ever there was one. Of course, he dispatched another in Mrs. Clinton, who, against all expectations, emerged as a lower- to middle-class spokesman and all-purpose warrior queen.

As a feminist and graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was an unlikely choice to appeal to Jacksonians, but she won them over by her grit, tenacity and stubborn refusal to give in to pressure. Like Mr. McCain, she gave the impression that she would never stop fighting, while Mr. Obama, as Mr. Barone puts it, gave "the impression, through his demeanor and through his statements that he would never start."

Mr. Obama may be the first nonwhite with a serious chance of reaching the White House, but he is also the latest in a long line of anti-Jacksonians who have tried and failed. The second obstacle may prove more formidable than the first.

In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson, the first black candidate to compete seriously in the national primaries, won the black vote in them by 9-to-1 margins but carried virtually nobody else. Historically, Acadmician-like white candidates win the upscale white vote and the students but tend to do poorly elsewhere.

As the first black candidate to run on the wine track, Mr. Obama combines these two demographics – though, to his credit, his appeal is nonracial, and he didn't begin to win large tracts of black voters until after winning lily-white Iowa.

Nonetheless, it is the addition of the blacks to the students and upper-scale whites that allowed him to run better than the Gary Harts and the Bill Bradleys – and his share of the white vote, and his failings within it, tracked largely with theirs.

"Jacksonians may reject certain kinds of candidates, but not because they're black," Mr. Barone found. "A black candidate who will join them in fighting against attacks on their family or their country is all right with them."

Mr. Obama's problem may be less that he is running while black than that he is running to be the first academic elected president, a category that is 0-for-8 in national contests thus far. He is peering into an abyss not of bias, but a large Jackson Hole of rejection by warrior voters. And this problem is more than skin deep.

Complicating all this are the disparate facts that the voters most imbued with Jacksonian instincts – Southerners, rural voters and many white ethnics – are those most suspected of harboring deep racial bias, and that the first credible black candidate to be running for president of the world's greatest power is also one of the least Jacksonian candidates who ever drew breath.

The interesting counterexample, of course, would be to see a black Jacksonian run against a white academic, and if Colin Powell had chosen to run in 1996, we might have seen this take place. The charming, war-tested moderate Powell would have presented a fair test of whether an ultra-acceptable black candidate could have been undermined by prejudice. The charming, untested and left-wing Obama will not.

Now let us imagine a different candidate, one who looks like Barack Obama, with the same mixed-race, international background, even the same middle name. But this time, he is Col. Obama, a veteran of the war in Iraq, a tough Marine with a "take no prisoners" attitude, who vows to follow Osama bin Laden to the outskirts of hell.

He comes from the culture of the military (the most color-blind and merit-based in the country) and not the rarefied air of Hyde Park. He goes to a church with a mixed-race congregation and a rational preacher. He has never met Bill Ayers; if he did, he would flatten him. He thinks arugula is a town near Bogotá and has Toby Keith on his favorites list.

Would he strike no chords at all in Jacksonian country? Does anyone think he would lose West Virginia by 41 points?

For those Jacksonians who would be fine with a black man in the White House (not as tiny a group as Newsweek thinks), Col. Obama is the one we are waiting for. When we will get him is anyone's guess.


Noemie Emery is author most recently of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families" and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, where a version of this essay first appeared.