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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (53087)	3/11/2008 11:23:31 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541955

>> Now we have Geraldine Ferraro playing the race card.<< CSFO - I have been thinking about the very well expressed opinions on how Ferraro was not playing the race card that were posted by Oeconomicus and Lane3 (and I think one other person). I think it's probably true that Ferraro did not intend to mean that people were voting for Obama solely because he was black, or that he had gotten where he is just for that reason. I'm sure she feels, as Oeconomicus and Lane3 do, that he has gotten some extra attention because he's black, and because that makes for a better story. And that, of course, has helped him. He has also enjoyed quite a bit of support from black voters, much of which, of course, is due to his being black. But I'm still not buying the idea that his race has been, overall, a help to him. It's worth reminding ourselves that Obama did not start out with a majority of the black voters backing him. In the beginning, he was even accused of "not being black enough", and Clinton was polling higher among black voters than he was. He had to win over those voters, and he did. One of the things he had to do to gain their support was to show that white people would vote for him in large numbers, which he did in many mostly white states. Now, he's getting a lot of flack about his association with a church that promotes the idea of black people taking care of each other, and not depending on white people. He has been attacked because of the names given to him by his African father. And there are still a lot of people out there, whether we would like to believe it or not, who simply will not vote for any black man for President. Some people still insist that "the nation isn't ready" for a black president. I really don't see how the whole picture adds up to the black thing being an advantage. If he were white, he wouldn't have gotten some of the extra positive attention. He wouldn't have gotten some of the extra negative attention, either. (And say what you will, he has gotten some negative press, too.) But he would still come across very well on television. He would still be a young, intelligent man with charisma and the ability to inspire people to hope. And he wouldn't have people asking whether he got where he is because of his race. - Allen