I agree with the OP, and it has nothing to do with Republicans.
Racism and sexism exist on the Democrats’ side as well. The intense hatred Democrats have for Bush, the desperate need for a drastic change, has made it possible (even likely) that they will nominate and vote for a woman or a black man.
I don’t think it will make Republicans any more likely to vote for a female or black Democrat for president. But, especially since the current Republican hopefuls are so weak, voter turnout for Republicans could be low enough to allow Obama or Clinton to win.
Trouble is, if there is sufficient anti-female or anti-black prejudice out there to sink such a candidacy, you aren’t going to know until its too late. Very few people are going to openly admit to such an outdated prejudice, even if they are so afflicted. Hell, very few of those people would admit it even to themselves! Ask such a person about Obama or Hillary, and they will open a can of talking point, pour it into a bowl and offer you a spoon, but damned if they’ll say “Can’t vote for a woman/black, can’t trust them.” And certainly not in the presence of their yesdears.
It is far subtler and less insidious than that.
When faced with a choice, many well-meaning people will simply be more comfortable with the white male on a deep subconscious level. By ‘many’ I mean 20-30%.
Because of the problems of this administration, the typical swing voter is going to be placing a premium on managerial competence. A good bureaucrat. Somebody familiar, boring, and NOT edgy.
Gore would be the PERFECT candidate for the Dems.
Not only will a black / female nomination draw out the redneck republicans who haven’t voted since 1980, southern democrats will be a lot more likely to abstain or cross party lines. Republicans undersatnd southern democrats better than the democratic party itself. The key is in the south, the Dems have lost it over and over when giving them the wrong candidate and won it when giving them the right one. There just too stupid too make the observation.
Please bear in mind that since LBJ signed the Civl Rights Act and presciently declared, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation,” and since the success of Nixon’s Southern strategy, most former Southern Democrats who were racists have migrated over to the Republican Party (many of them by way of George Wallace’s shortlived Independent American Party), to the point that the South is now actually the Republican Party’s main base, and the Dems can almost always count on the black vote. (Both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis would turn in their graves.) IOW, those white Southerners who, after all that, remain Democrats are probably not racists.
And the “generation” of time of which LBJ spoke is now past.
Strom Thurmond and the “Dixiecrats” as well as a phenomenon in NC called “Jessiecrats” are still a segment of the population that many don’t acknowledge, as you aptly demonstrate. In NC, Jim Hunt, a Democrat, was elected to 4 terms as Governor. Mike Easley, a Democrat was elected in 2001 after Hunt last left the office. Hunt was elected and re elected despite stereotypical liberal spending. The region fared well and gains were made in education. Hunt also maintained the support of farmers through spending for agriculture. There are 2.4 million registered Democrats in NC and 1.7 million Republicans. The last time the state went republican in the presidential election was in 1976 (Carter), when every southern state save Virginia went that way.
Now why would a state that is so friendly to it’s in state, southern democrats be so solidly red ? Especially considering there are 3/4 of a million more democrats than republicans ? Here is a clue of what old school southern democrats like about southern democratic candidates:
"Hunt was criticized for allowing Darryl Hunt (no close relation known) to remain in prison for twenty years after the wrongfully convicted Winston-Salem man was exonerated by exculpatory DNA evidence which pointed to another perpetrator. "
The part about (no close realtion known), really makes sense when you find out he was a black man.
What makes you think that? Actually I’d like to know:
Why people presume that racism is linked to party affiliation in America
Why people presume that the South is especially racist compared to the rest of the country
Why people presume that a black politician would have trouble getting elected in the South
While I know that blacks have dispersed themselves throughout the country and are no longer as concentrated in the South as they once were, I still believe the greatest concentration of blacks is in the South. I’d also be surprised if, on average, the southern states (we’ll define that as states which seceded during the ACW) don’t have a higher number of black elected officials per capita than the rest of the country. Most major Southern cities are dominated by black political leaders (which should not be surprising–cities like New Orleans and Atlanta are predominantly black and they predominantly elect black leaders.)
If Barack Obama doesn’t get elected, it won’t be primarily because of the color of his skin. I’m pretty sure that in this very forum I’ve seen links to polls which indicate a large portion of Americans would vote for a black presidential candidate.
Of course, I think there are more people out there than might show up in polling who just simply won’t vote for a black leader. However, I also think there is a significant portion of voters who will vote for the black candidate over the white candidate every time, so the effects might offset to a large degree.
I predict Obama will not be our next President and I say that the primary reason will be he won’t get nominated.
Because, from Nixon onwards, the Pubs consciously and deliberately made it their own.
History, and the fact that even today racist organizations such as the Klan seem to be more prevalent here than elsewhere.
See above. Certainly we have many black elected officials in the South – mainly in black-majority cities and towns and legislative districts. Otherwise, it can be problematic. The only black governor in the South since Reconstruction was Douglas Wilder of Virginia, IIRC. I recall in 1994, when Betty Castor resigned as Florida Education Commissioner to become president of the University of South Florida, Governor Chiles appointed an African-American (forget his name) to the education post. When he ran for actual election to the office in the next election – which would have made him the first black elected Cabinet-level official in this state since, well, since Reconstruction – he was careful not to include his picture in his campaign literature. But his Pub opponent did print the incumbent’s picture in his literature, and won. Not a controlled experiment, I know.
Ummm…you ain’t frum around here either…are ya ? #1 = Party affiliation and racism are linked by economic factors. Afirmative action, Public Assistance for those in poverty (among which minorities are over represented) and just the actual make up the parties entail. Also, the fact that republicans, especially in the south, have repeatedly elected governors, senators, and sponsored presidential candidtes who haven’t minded standing on the senate floor, in recent history, announcing that black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, are genetically inferior, etc. That seem like an idicator of racism to you ? For furhter questions, review the history of Strom Thurmond, Jessie Helms, Trent Lott, etc. Click on the link above for the same point, set to music.
#2 = Because the south is more racist than the rest of the country. I live here. Come visit if you like. It’ll make you sick to your stomach on at least a weekly basis.
#3 = Blacks don’t have such a difficult time getting elected in the south. In fact, they probably stand a better chance due to population distribution and the make up of the democrtatic party in regions of the south. http://www.census.gov/geo/www/mapGallery/images/black.jpg
take a look at the above map and ler’s continue from there.
You love bringing this up, and it just isn’t the case. Even if we assume that your interpretation of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” is correct it doesn’t do anything to indicate that the GOP has any sort of monopoly on racist voters. It’s my contention that most people are racist in varying degrees.
It’s from a relatively long string of life experiences, and I think it’s really hard to submit any evidence to prove it, which is why it’s just sort of my gut-feeling. I mean, blacks have way more employment opportunities than they once did. But just because they are employed doesn’t mean their employer isn’t a racist. I’ve known lots of people who work in management positions in white-collar industries who will talk in bars about how their black workers are lazy and et cetera and how they hate having to keep them on because of “affirmative action.”
There’s under 10,000 people who are in the Ku Klux Klan, nationwide. I don’t disagree that the South has a history of more extreme racism than the rest of the country. But I wasn’t talking about what “level of racism” is seen across the country, but general prevalence. We like to act like we’re in a relatively cultured society but it has been my experience that a huge portion of people all over the country exhibit strongly racist behaviors.
Pretty much every city in the country used to have entire neighborhoods where restrictive covenants kept blacks from moving in–I think it was a case of this in Seattle that ended up going to the SCOTUS back in the 1940s that got the practice declared unconstitutional. Although neighborhood segregation continued (and continues) in most major cities to this very day using other means.
The Civil War is also a great example (albeit not relevant per se to current events), the Civil War wasn’t a war between a bunch of racially enlightened northerners and a bunch of racist Southerners. It was a war between a bunch of racist Northerners and a bunch of racist Southerners. Sure, the Northerners (at least a large portion of them) were opposed to the practice of slavery. But the prevailing opinion in white America in 1860, North and South was that blacks were innately “less” than whites. In a sort of perversion of science, when Darwin’s ideas started catching on a lot of people misapplied them to human ethnicities and among a lot of the cultured, educated upper middle class it was a pretty popular idea around the 1880-1920 or so period to believe that blacks were inferior because they were less evolved than whites.
How many white-majority districts in the entire country do you think have black elected officials? It’s an almost non-existent phenomenon in my experience. It’s not an accident that political leaders all across the country try to create racially homogeneous districts.
Sure am, and I’ve lived most of my life here, too.
The first part of this doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. It’s well known that a larger portion of blacks than whites are poor. It’s also well known that the Democrats are generally the party that is favored by the poor while the Republicans are favored by the wealthier Americans. That shows that party affiliation is certainly linked to economic factors. But I just am not seeing how you link it to racial ones. Are you arguing that the GOP is racist because it doesn’t support affirmative action (a racist policy in and of itself), or because they don’t advocate as much public welfare as the (typical) Democrat politician does? You might have a leg to stand on there if the GOP was only trying to deny welfare benefits to poor blacks. But the GOP has typically been opposed to a large welfare state in general, not because many blacks are on some type of public assistance.
As for the three specific political leaders you mentioned, I’ll remind you that the only active American Senator who has ever bee in the Ku Klux Klan is Robert Byrd, one of the leading Democrats in the Senate. He’s even let the “n-word” slip in recent years.
I live here, I disagree, and my stomach is fine. I think the most day-to-day racism I ever witnessed as in New Jersey, but that’s all anecdotal. I’d also say I see the least racism not in states like New York or California but in states like West Virginia and say, Idaho. We’re talking about “observed racist behavior” anecdotally, of course. I don’t think it is because West Virginia and Idaho are enlightened while California and New York are not. I think the fact that those two states have an almost non-existent minority population tends to mean racial issues in general don’t come up much at all in daily discussion. But anytime I’ve spent a significant period of time in California and New York (two prominent “liberal, racially enlightened” states) I’ve heard whites bitching about “spics” or “niggers” and et cetera. I haven’t spent much time in certain states (like say, Montana or the Dakotas) so I can’t speak anecdotally about all 50, but based on the my experiences and travels it is the places where a lot of minorities are mixed in with whites that I hear more day-to-day racist remarks/behaviors versus relatively homogeneous places.
So you agree then, with my assertion that the South is actually the most friendly of all America’s region’s for black political leaders?
There’s differing opinions on the meaning of the Confederate flags (especially when talking about one type of Confederate flag versus another as there are several different types), I certainly agree that some of them are flown out of racist ideals. Some of them are flown because the person feels it signifies that they are a “rebel” (but not in the sense that the Confederates were, rather in the sense of “I’m going to get drunk and drive my Trans-Am 110 mph down the freeway.”) Some of them are flown out of a desire to represent “Southern pride” (without racist connotations.) I’m not a big fan of the Confederacy for a lot of reasons though, so even the more innocuous versions of their flags, I don’t particularly like seeing.
What is the logical connection between those two sentences?