Angry White Man
For black voters, Dean is the un-Clinton.
BY JASON L. RILEY
Mr. Riley is a senior editorial page writer at the Journal.
Unfortunate as it is true, Democrats don't battle Republicans for the black vote. They battle apathy. Blacks vote Democrat or stay home. Which prompts two questions: Will Howard Dean, the third-generation Yalie from Vermont by way of Park Avenue, have a problem ginning up enough black support if he wins the Democratic nomination for president?
And does it matter?
Such questions would have seemed silly four years ago. Al Gore won nine of every 10 black votes in 2000, which was even better than Bill Clinton's 84% in 1996. But both men were Southerners, and Mr. Clinton in particular displayed a personal comfort with blacks unmatched by any Oval Office resident in history. The former president may not have had much to offer besides government largesse, but to watch him address a black congregation or an NAACP convention was to see a man totally at ease.
Mr. Dean's comportment, suffice it to say, is pretty much what Chris Rock has in mind when he's impersonating a white stiff. And his brief courtship of the Confederate flag voting bloc betrayed a certain clumsiness on racial matters that he's yet to live down. Not that the temperamental ex-governor isn't trying. It's just that his attempts thus far to win credibility in the 'hood have been awkward and crude. The Dean camp, for example, likes to point out that as a Yale undergrad the candidate requested black roommates. This sort of "some of my best friends in college were black" argument is only slightly less insulting than if Mr. Dean were to inform us that his rapport with black folks derives from having had a black housekeeper while growing up.
In Sunday's debate, Al Sharpton, who mau-maus whites for a living and never misses an opportunity to needle the front-runner on race, told Mr. Dean acerbically, "It seems as though you discovered blacks and browns during this campaign." Given Mr. Dean's very recent discovery of openly religious Americans, who knows? Maybe black America is another recent discovery and Mr. Sharpton is on to something. In any case, the Democratic Party has long known the importance of the black vote, which is one reason Republicans are much more excited than many Democrats about a Dean nomination.
Democrats are increasingly dependent on the black electorate because they've been steadily losing favor with moderate blue-collar whites--especially white men. White flight from the party began to manifest itself in the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972, but it was more acutely felt in Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis's spectacularly unsuccessful bids for president in 1984 and 1988.
Bill Clinton couldn't reverse this trend but did manage to slow it down. He and other New Democrats found a way to hold on to enough white voters in the South and the industrial Midwest to win general elections. The 1990s were spent nudging a reluctant party to the political center--welfare reform, capital gains tax cuts, and Nafta--without alienating urban centers. In 2000, however, Al Gore lost too much white support to sustain this delicate coalition. George W. Bush beat him by 12 points among whites generally and by 24 points among white men. Mr. Bush won states--like Arkansas, Tennessee and West Virginia--that his opponent badly needed. And what's even more troublesome for the next Democratic nominee is the knowledge that Mr. Gore's loss occurred under conditions vastly more favorable than those which the party will face 10 months from now.
"The fact is," says Michael Barone, author of The Almanac of American Politics, "Gore won 48% of the vote as the candidate of the incumbent party in a time of apparent peace and apparent prosperity. That is not the posture from which Democrats are running today."
If Democrats want to have a chance in November, they'll have to reproduce Mr. Gore's numbers and then some. Which means a Candidate Dean, who polls strongest among Northern, secular, white liberals with college degrees, would need to do at least as well as Mr. Gore among blacks, who tend to be poorer, less educated, more religious and from the South. Mr. Dean's close association with same-sex civil unions--thanks to a controversial bill he signed into law as governor--also won't endear him to culturally conservative blacks, who frown on homosexuality and oppose gay marriage by 2-to-1.
Charlie Rangel, the Harlem Democrat, says none of that matters. He insists--and in a tone that suggests he really believes unshakable racial fealty to one party in a two-party system is a good thing--that blacks will turn out in high numbers for whichever candidate has the (D) after his name. "Blacks will never forget that Bush stole the election in 2000," says Mr. Rangel, who's supporting Wesley Clark for the nomination because he thinks the retired general stands a better chance against Mr. Bush.
But other, less liberal, observers aren't so sure that blacks--and enough white moderates--are currently poised to support Mr. Dean and his tax-raising, antiwar positions in the numbers he needs to become the first Northern Democratic president since JFK. "For a Democrat to win," says Al From of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, "he'll have to have a heavy black vote, but he also has to go beyond that because the black vote is only 10% of the total vote." Assuming Mr. Dean gets Clinton-Gore numbers among blacks, he says, "he still gets killed in the outer suburbs among swing voters."
If the problem for Democrats is the lack of a center-left coalition à la Bill Clinton, Howard Dean is hardly the answer. "You can't win on anger," says Mr. From. "It's not a very good glue for a political party. If it disappears, there's nothing to hold you together."
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