How racism hurts Obama

last updated 8 January 2015

The issue of race is back in the campaign spotlight, said Jonathan Stein in Mother Jones online, and the news is "pretty disheartening." An Associated Press-Yahoo study estimated that Barack Obama's support would be 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racism, a difference big enough to tip a tight race.

The media are “shamefully stoking” the claim that only racism can defeat Obama, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. If reporters were more objective, they’d stress that Obama’s problem is racism “at the heart of the Democratic Party,” but “such objectivity would cause too much cognitive dissonance for a press corps that defines ‘racist’ as shorthand for Republican and sees itself as the publicity arm of the Obama campaign.”