WASHINGTON — Today, it’s almost an article of faith among pundits and pollsters that Hillary Clinton can’t win the African American vote because Barack Obama has that bloc sewn up. A year ago, many pundits held another unshakable belief. The polls showed Hillary sitting pretty with black Democrats. Obama, of course, was as black then as he is now.
But Hillary trumped him among black voters, said the pundits. The numbers told the story.
Turn the calendar back to December 2006 and January 2007. That’s when Post-ABC News polls showed the New York senator holding a commanding lead over Obama among African American voters — 60 percent to 20 percent. She was the Democratic heir apparent to Bill Clinton, the nation’s “first black president,” as Toni Morrison famously dubbed him.
Name recognition, loyalty to her husband and the belief that she was more electable contributed to Hillary ‘s standing. So did the strong backing of several older generations of black politicians — or at least that’s what the pundits and the old-school Democratic pols thought.
Last year, Hillary Clinton was riding high: The black vote was hers to lose. So what accounts for her sharp reversal of fortune? Hillary made the mistake of assuming that what was Bill’s was hers — she believed headlines that shouted such things as “Poll: Many Black Voters Don’t Identify With Obama.” Now that votes are being counted, the Clintons have changed their tune, suggesting that Obama’s color counts more with black voters than her years of service to America.
She tried to sell that idea after her loss in Louisiana’s primary, dismissing votes for her opponent as coming from “a very strong and very proud African American electorate.” Bill Clinton pushed that line when he suggested that if Obama won South Carolina’s Democratic primary, it was because he’s a black candidate in a state where blacks are a large share of the population.
“They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender. That’s why people tell me Hillary doesn’t have a chance of winning here,” the former president said. The Clintons sought to marginalize Obama as a candidate for African Americans. It backfired.
African American voters and millions of other Americans aren’t buying what Hillary Clinton is selling. They didn’t regard her presidency as inevitable. Nor did they consider her years as first lady, or her time spent with Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm or her service on Wal-Mart’s board of directors as qualifying her to become the nation’s commander in chief.
They recognized the yeast in Hillary Clinton’s resume.
And Obama’s message of hope and transformation, as National Urban League President Marc Morial observed, is resonating across race and class lines.
Clinton and her advisers also misread where African Americans are in 2008.
Once upon a time, all a white politician had to do to win black votes was to be on good terms with the Congressional Black Caucus, suck up to black pastors and flatter their choirs on Sunday morning, and, oh, yeah, spread around a little money leading up to Election Day.
Those days are coming to an end.
Such condescension today is offensive to African Americans, who expect to be treated as thinking adults.
Equally off-putting was the Clintons’ assertion, once Obama’s black support became evident, that his pigmentation was the reason — as if African Americans are so color-struck that in a contest between a white and a black candidate, any black face will do. The record shows otherwise.
Nearly half of the primary electorate in South Carolina, where Obama trounced Hillary is black. That didn’t stop John Edwards from defeating Al Sharpton in 2004, 45 percent to 10 percent. The results were virtually the same for Sharpton in Virginia and Georgia in 2004 — states Obama carried handily this year. Racial pride is not without limits. Whatever Al Sharpton’s contributions to civil rights, most African American voters simply didn’t see him as presidential material and voted accordingly.
Obama is not Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Yes, he does evoke a sense of pride in many African Americans. But it’s because of what he represents in the campaign: An inspirational African American who has strong personal qualities, excellent credentials, a vision for America and a family that will make the nation proud.
As they used to say in my old neighborhood, the Clintons “low-rated” Obama. Beneath their smiles, the Clintons are constitutionally unable to accept the possibility that he could be viewed more favorably or thought to be more capable of uniting and leading the country than Hillary.
Many African Americans have come to hold that view.
They aren’t alone.
