The Death of Political Hope

I hope I'm wrong, but I think the 2008 PA Primary marks the beginning of the end for the Obama campaign. David Brooks said it well on the News Hour last night: it's hard to be a "tough hope miester." I guess it's just as well that Google never put his name in their spellchecker.

I call it the end because the polls and pundits testify that the establishment has succeed in its two primary objectives (pun intended):

1. Just enough Blacks have been convinced that it is somehow racial—and thus wrong—to vote for Obama in part out of racial solidarity. Thus, they vote against him, but seldom because of his politics.
2. Just enough whites have been convinced that they shouldn't vote for him because of some fictitious, nebulous lack of solidarity on his part with "real Americans."

It's a political K.O. combination. And as soon as the polls seemed to show it, the pundits begin to tout it relentlessly. "Obama has a hard row to hoe." "More of Hillary's supporters now say they will not vote for Barak in a general election, than Barak supporters say they won't vote for Hillary." I literally lost count of how of how many times it was surmised on CNN with such visibly sincere regret that it would be 'nearly impossible for Barak to win the general election without the support of the average, white, lunch-bucket voter'—as if, based on the reportedly 2100 Pennsylvanians polled, it were a foregone conclusion that Obama had lost majority white support everywhere and that blacks don't carry lunch-buckets.

(Need we talk about media's ability to shape public opinion. We even use qualifiers anymore, like "90% of the few blacks polled said they voted for Obama," to talk about our supposedly scientific sampling of people. If only 2000 people are sampled how many represent which demographic in order to be an adequate composite sampling of an entire state? I was flabbergasted by the number of times I heard "white" coupled with "won't" last night. It felt like all the language became us-versus-them.)

The way this has played out reminds me of the way voting districts in the South were redrawn after Reconstruction, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and then again in the 1990s. I remember reading as a student about gerrymandering. Blacks went from having no rights of citizenship prior to the Civil War (1863) to having voting districts drawn in such a way that it minimized the political influence of people of color throughout the period of Jim Crow ( roughly 1865-1965). "After the Voting Rights Act, racial gerrymandering was ironically 'flipped around' to create 'majority-minority' districts. Using this practice, also called 'affirmative gerrymandering,' these districts were created with the stated purpose of redressing previous discrimination to ensure higher ethnic minority representation in government." In the 1990s, this remediation was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (right after the 'conservative revolution'). Yet, to the best of my knowledge, the rulings didn't posit a required remedy. It didn't require that lawmakers take maps of their states and cut them grid-like into equal size districts as a way to not favor any particular group. And I remember thinking:

If it is somehow wrong to construct voting districts along racial lines, it has to be just as perilous to deconstruct them for racial reasons as well. How do you determine which districts to redraw? How do you stop predominately white legislative bodies from redrawing every predominately colored district (just because it happens to be a district predominately of people of color)?

Thus, the Supreme Court ruled that the historically privileged could remain so.

I feel the same about the way the Establishment of both parties have come after Obama. Instead of offering intelligent critique of Barak Obama's policies, positions or politics, they have chosen instead to criticize his experience for being different from "real Americans." And a just enough people have bought it and decided to let the historically privileged remain so.