TNR BLOG - DO BLACK VOTERS HOLD BOSTON AGAINST KERRY?: The standard explanations for why John Kerry is polling worse than expected among black voters are a.) that Bush is making some headway on gay marriage, and b.) that Kerry is poorly suited by sensibility to appeal to black voters. As Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings puts it in today's New York Times, "I think that Kerry's biggest problem is that he is not Clinton. ... A lot of people are expecting a Bill Clinton, and that's not who Kerry is, but on the other hand his heart is right."
There's probably something to both of these explanations. But there may be another alternative: What if being specifically from Massachusetts is problematic among black voters, independent of Kerry's reserved disposition. As the Times article points out, only 5 percent of the Massachusetts population is black. Boston itself has a reputation for being a pretty tough place for African Americans to live--so much so that baseball god Barry Bonds recently felt moved to identify Boston as the one place he'd refuse to play. The comment created a minor stir in the sports media and seemed to resonate in particular among African American commentators. (Former baseball pro Harold Reynolds explained on ESPN2's "Baseball Tonight" that he could see where Bonds was coming from even though he felt the city's attitude toward black athletes had improved in the last few decades.) Friends and acquaintances of mine who are black occasionally confide that they don't feel entirely comfortable in Boston--or that they stay away from it because they don't think they'd feel comfortable there.
After a several-month period in which the Democrats held their national convention in Boston, and Kerry has been singing the praises of his beloved Red Sox and Patriots, maybe some African Americans have grown a little skeptical. (True, Michael Dukakis won about 86 percent of the black vote in 1988, but that was after George H.W. Bush had waged a bitter, racially-divisive campaign, whose signature achievement was the inflammatory Willie Horton ad. And, even so, Dukakis's percentage of the black vote was down slightly from the 90 percent Walter Mondale received in 1984.)
NOTE: For a take on why Boston isn't actually more racist than any other major city, see this piece by my boss, Peter Beinart.
UPDATE: My TNR colleague Jason Zengerle e-mails to point out how lily white the Red Sox crowd looks when the Fox cameras pan Fenway during the playoff games. The same thought occurred to the person I was watching the game with last night. I'm pretty sure there have never been this many shots of the Fenway faithful during a presidential campaign, and certainly not when a Massachusetts politician has been on the ticket. (The Red Sox made the playoffs in 1988, but they were swept in four games by the Oakland A's in the American League Championship Series, which would have limited the exposure of the hometown fans.) |
