Yet again, race

I was sitting in a hotel bar in Columbia, South Carolina, a few months ago when news of the Clinton-Obama slugfest came on the TV screen and was struck to see how the entire (100% white) crowd turned away in obvious dislike. South Carolina is bright red Republican territory, but the people in that room weren’t interested in giving either of the Democratic candidates even a cursory hearing.

So it didn’t surprise me much to see a pattern appear in the waning days of the campaign, a distinct polarization and mirror-bandwagon effect in which those states and localities where a solid bloc of the population was inclined to take Obama’s candidacy seriously broke for him decidedly while those areas that never gave him a second look piled on at the end in the opposite direction.

So you saw the polling numbers in places like Oklahoma and the Appalachian states move from 10+ in McCain’s favor to 20+ and even 30+ in the final days just as Ohio, Virginia, Florida and New Mexico were tumbling rapidly into the blue column. It was as if the existence of a critical mass of Obama signs and buttons and an active campaign operation had given people the opportunity to think that the skinny black kid might make a good leader after all.

Meanwhile, those in the traditional Republican camp seemed to reinforce each other and swing waverers away from him. Arkansas is the best example where McCain did far better than W did in either 2000 or 2004.

Today’s New York Times suggests that some sort of Bradley effect—although the paper thankfully never uses that dumb term—was clearly in operation in these areas. Perhaps it should be called the ‘Bull Connor effect’ judging from the comments reporters gleaned from locals in Alabama and elsewhere. These rural southerners weren’t saying one thing to pollsters and then switching in the privacy of the voting booth—they were comfortably consistent about their racist views throughout.

The article suggests that these areas risk marginalizing themselves in national politics as the rest of the country moves on. It notes that most Republicans in Congress now are southerners and that the party might no longer build any momentum outside of those areas where race still has the old pull.

So after four decades of their southern strategy of playing to white racial resentments, the Republicans are stuck with themselves, doubly so now that they’ve completely alienated Hispanics by inflaming the Dobbsian fury against immigrants. Their doomed national convention looked like a White Citizens Council rally from the 1960s, and even their concluding chant of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill!’ was an eerily ironic echo of ‘Burn, Baby, Burn!’ from the same epoch.

Let’s hope the Times is right and these clowns are consigned to history’s unforgiving museum. It’s time to stop getting our national politics from people still nostalgic for Jim Crow.

Postscript: The North may have gotten past Obama’s race, but the new n------ are, of course, Hispanics even up in good ol’ blue New York. A mixed-race gang of teens was arrested on Long Island yesterday for stabbing an Ecuadorian guy to death, apparently because he was the wrong ethnicity. Good work, Lou!