Obama: Will racism cost him the election?

If Barack Obama loses in November, said Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times, it will likely be because “ugly prejudices” cost him crucial votes. The nation’s first black presidential candidate is now running against a strong headwind of latent bigotry, with a disturbing number of voters viewing him as a suspicious and threatening Other. More registered voters—13 percent—erroneously say that Obama is a Muslim today than thought so in March. “More ominously,” 16 percent say they’re unsure of his religion because they’ve heard “different things.” In conservative Christian circles and radio stations, there is talk that Obama might actually be—no kidding—the Antichrist. What’s happening? Simply put, the campaign to “de-Americanize” Obama is succeeding.

Even some of Obama’s advisors are now worried, said Marc Ambinder in TheAtlantic.com. About a third of white Democrats have a stubborn resistance to supporting him. A new survey of racial attitudes by the Associated Press and Yahoo News explains why, finding persistent racial resentment among these voters. Many complain that blacks have received “special favors” and don’t work as hard as whites. The resentment factor, the polltakers estimate, could cost Obama as many as six percentage points in November.

Crying racism may make Democrats feel better, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com, but it’s a poor excuse for Obama’s pitiful performance in this campaign. Given the state of the economy and the public’s appetite for “change,” the Democratic nominee should be far ahead in the polls, instead of leading by a scant couple of points. He’s struggling not because of his complexion but because he is “so vapid and hesitant and gutless.” This supposed orator has not uttered a single memorable line in the past six months, and on such topics as the surge in Iraq and Russia’s offensive in Georgia, has provided nothing but politically calculated and incoherent responses. Obama’s real problem is that the longer voters see him perform, the more they doubt his “credentials for the presidency.”

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So spare us the whining about “latent racism,” said Carol Platt Liebau in Townhall.com. It may be true, as that AP poll found, that some whites still hold stereotypes and resentments about blacks. But virtually everyone—including the liberal elites—operates on the basis of broad stereotypes, as even Obama did when he referred to small-town Americans “clinging” to guns and religion. Nonetheless, most Americans are quite capable of seeing past broad generalizations to evaluating specific candidates “on their own merits.” And it’s for that reason that Obama can’t close the deal with so many Democrats and independents, who still worry about his “inexperience” and “naïveté.” If he can reassure voters on those counts, “the matter of his race will largely take care of itself.”

Tell that to the guys down at the union hall, said Dick Polman in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Union organizers in key states are being widely quoted as saying they are facing outright resistance to Obama because of his race. A Kentucky miner was quoted as saying he wouldn’t vote for “a colored man” because “he’ll put too many coloreds in jobs.” The evidence of racism among working-class whites “has become impossible to ignore.” In Pennsylvania’s presidential primary, for example, 12 percent of Democrats were “willing to tell exit pollsters, eye to eye, that race was an important factor, to Obama’s detriment” in their vote. “Isn’t it fair to assume that the real percentage was actually higher?”

It’s a fair guess, said John B. Judis in TheNewRepublic.com, but a guess is all it is. Consider the AP poll that found persistent white resentment of blacks: Half of the Democrats with supposedly bigoted views said they were supporting Obama anyway. With jobs fleeing abroad and Wall Street in collapse, Obama may still win over working-class whites if he succeeds in drawing “a sharp line between him and McCain on economic issues.” In this election, said Adam Smith in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times, previous verities may be moot. Never before has America chosen between a white man and a black man to be its next president, and never since the Depression has the electorate been so dissatisfied with the status quo. Even after the votes are all counted, “no one can know with certainty how much race mattered. Probably no one ever will.”