from 3 Aug 2008
I'm not going to pretend to be uber-qualified to write about race, and I'm not going to go link-crazy here, but race is starting to come out as factor in the presidential race right now, and I feel the need to comment. I'm a white male who works in a mostly white office, so most of the racism I come across is in the media.
People told me during the primary season that they thought if Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee, which it appears he will be (and if he's not, he'll have a lot of explaining to do, since he's campaigning; same with John McCain, by the way – neither of these guys is official yet), people would vote for McCain just because of Obama's race.
Thing is, the people who would vote for president based on race would also vote for president based on gender. It would have been six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the-other on that count.
The latest polls are out, and guess what?
• People think race is going to be a factor
• Obama is leading McCain by about six points
• Add in Ralph Nader and Bob Barr, and Obama is up by 13 points (five points to Nader, two to Barr)
What does this say to me? Either:
(a) There's a bit of third-person effect going on here. That is, "race doesn't matter to me, but I bet it does to everyone else." Or,
(b) Race does matter, but it's not to whom you think. The people who want an old white guy in office aren't necessarily Republicans or even Conservatives. They don't care which old white guy they put in office, so long as it's an old white guy.
We knew that some McCain voters could defect to Barr. But did anybody honestly think Nader would be sucking votes from McCain?
What I do know about racism is this. If Obama gets elected, there will be extra pressure on him. If he has a lousy presidency, a large group of people who thought they were taking a "very open-minded risk" voting for him will cite it as an example that a black man can't run the country. And if he does well, there will be a group of people who will pat him on the head (proverbially, anyway) and say, "Good boy. You proved us wrong."
None of that makes me happy. It's just the way I see it.
Personally, I'm going to vote for the person this year I think will do the best job in the White House, whether it's one of the four men mentioned here, Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, or one of the other dozens of candidates who will no doubt join the race between now and November.
December 26th, 2009 at 09:39
I was reading Cynthia McKinney’s editorial in the paper this evening and she was absolutely right when she said the “race card” ( a term I hate, by the way) has been in this political race ever since Obama said he was running for the office of president. Race is easily a factor, but I think it’s a bigger factor than sex would have been, mainly because there’s just this very large segment of people who have been indoctrinated to hate Hillary Clinton, whether they knew anything about her or not, and thus sex wouldn’t have been such a big deal.
Regardless, something new will happen with this year’s presidential election. We’ll either have our first black president or our oldest president winning his first term. Overall, I have the same feeling I had with the last two elections; I can’t believe it’s as close as the pollsters are saying it is. But it is presidential politics, so one never knows what’s going to happen until it does.