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Obama's new battleground: white working class

BY GLENN THRUSH | glenn.thrush@newsday.com

April 27, 2008

WASHINGTON - The morning after Barack Obama lost the white vote in the Pennsylvania primary by 26 points, his top strategist was on TV suggesting his candidate didn't necessarily need blue-collar whites to win the White House.

"The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years," David Axelrod, Obama's senior media adviser told MSNBC. "This is not new that Democratic candidates don't rely solely on those votes."

Yet while Obama touts a multiracial coalition that has led to big wins in states like Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, he's encountered ambivalence, even resistance, among whites in general and lower-income whites specifically, according to exit polls. It's a trend that's given Hillary Rodham Clinton yet another chance and one that spells major trouble in a general election against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, experts say.

Racial divide by the numbers

"There is a racial divide in this election - there's no question about it," says University of Maryland political science professor Ron Walters, who studies the role of race in politics. "About 20 percent of working-class people in the Pennsylvania primary said race was a factor in their vote - that's probably grossly understated. [For Obama] it's a very dangerous situation."

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the highest-ranking black member of Congress, last week placed part of the blame on Bill Clinton, accusing him of "bizarre" conduct and of whipping up racial animosity with comments like those comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson, who had far fewer white supporters.

"I am concerned ... that the conduct of this campaign could very well make the nomination not worth having," said Clyburn, who hasn't endorsed either candidate. The former president, in turn, has charged the Obama campaign of playing the "race card" against his wife.

The number of white voters may be static but they still dominate national political life. In 2004, whites - who make up 77 percent of the national electorate - favored George W. Bush over John Kerry by a 58 percent to 41 percent margin.

Bush's wins in three critical swing states - Florida, Ohio and Missouri - are largely credited with securing him the election. In each state, he won the white vote by 10 to 15 percent.

But Obama is doing much worse than Kerry, even though the whites voting in the 2008 Democratic primaries are, on average, more liberal than those voting in the general election.

Clinton won the Florida primary on the strength of a 30-point advantage over Obama with whites. Obama won Missouri, thanks to record black turnout in big cities - but he lost the white vote by 18 percent, exit polls show.

Who he needs to win

In Pennsylvania, Clinton won 71 percent of union voters, a group that is predominantly white and working-class. The Illinois senator polls strongest among blacks and Volvo-crats - upper-income, highly educated whites clustered in college towns and big cities.

"Can he lose the white working class and still win the election? Sure," says E.J. Dionne, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution who writes a politics column for The Washington Post. "Can he get clobbered in the white working class and still win? No. In the general election, his majority has to include at least a substantial minority of the white working-class vote."

John Judis, co-author of "The Emerging Democratic Majority," believes demographic shifts will strongly favor Democrats over the near future as the party assembles a ruling coalition of women, educated whites and Hispanics. But he doesn't think Obama is in a position to benefit from such realignment.

"The congressional election coming up is where you will see the new majority coming out - I would be shocked if the Democrats don't see real gains in Congress," he said. "But there's a problem that people seem to have with the idea of a black presidential candidate. Is this going to be 1928, where voters rejected Al Smith, a Catholic? Or is it going to be 1960, where they got over it and voted for Kennedy?"

Obama's advisers say he can make up the difference, if necessary, by bringing new, young voters into the election and that he's more competitive than Kerry in states like Virginia, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada, which voted for Bush four years ago.

"He's also energizing blacks like never before," said Walters, "And he's going to put Virginia in play. He's going to be fine."

Retooling the campaign

For months leading up to his speech on race in Philadelphia, Obama publicly downplayed the significance of the problem. But the candidate himself is now admitting he needs to emphasize his working-class roots - especially after he was quoted saying "bitter" blue-collar voters "cling" to religion and guns.

"There's no doubt that a campaign has to continually fine-tune itself," Obama said during a Friday stop at a gas station in Indiana, which votes on May 6.

"I think one of the things we're going to have to do during the next several weeks is just remind people of where I come from," said Obama, who was raised by a single mother and went to Harvard Law School on a scholarship. "I was raised with far fewer advantages than either of my two remaining opponents."

What makes his problem so tricky, some observers say, is that it's really two issues rolled into one: lingering racism and a sense that he's a patrician who views their problems from a cool distance, like an Ivy League anthropologist.

The Illinois senator faces another major dilemma in the re-emergence of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has made racially charged comments and once shouted "God damn America!" from his Chicago pulpit.

To the chagrin of the Obama campaign, Wright has gone public in recent days and will field reporters' questions at the National Press Club in Washington tomorrow.

Republicans have taken advantage of the situation, with the North Carolina GOP taping a Wright-Obama TV ad over McCain's objections. Several TV stations in the state refused to run it - but the spot was a top political story over the weekend.

Hillary and Bill Clinton deny they have ever done anything to use Obama's race against him, arguing the Clinton White House was more responsive to African-American concerns than any administration in three decades. But like Clyburn, some observers believe the former president has been subtly trying to emphasize the racial divide between the campaigns with comments like his "race card" remark on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary.

"The Clintons are not naive about race," said Philip Klinkner, politics professor at Hamilton College who studies the role of race in American elections. "They come from the upper South where the whole game for white politicians was that you max-out black support and turnout, but that you keep enough of a distance that white voters aren't turned off. Bill Clinton played that game like a master in 1992, and he's trying to do it again."