That is what Stanley Kurtz would like you to think he has found in Obama’s career in Chicago politics, but for the most part his article simply fills in the edges of an image of the candidate that is quite familiar to those of us who have been following the campaign for any length of time.  There are some interesting details, but coming on the heels of Lizza’s profile the entire story has a bit of a redundant feel about it.  The angle of the article–that Obama has supported racial preferences and quotas, opposed racial profiling and fought against harsher penalties for juvenile offenders, among other things–is not really news, and it is obviously not news that his electoral strategy for years has been to combine support from the black community and progressives.  Concerning the latter, it hardly comes as news that Obama plotted his Senate primary electoral strategy in exactly the same way he ran his presidential primary strategy, since these are the constituencies to which he has appealed during his entire career.  There is a certain breathless quality to the piece, as if Kurtz believes what he has found reveals an Obama that has escaped notice until now: “Obama is, in fact, a left-winger!”  Well, yes.  As Obama might say, if you are surprised by any of this you haven’t been paying attention.  

Appearing at the end of the week when Obama addressed some hecklers in Florida by stressing how relatively outspoken he has been on matters concerning the black community, a lot of the story seems quite superfluous.  For instance, Kurtz details Obama’s support for a bill banning racial profiling, but Obama just this week highlighted his position on this, he clearly supports a federal ban on his own campaign site and makes a point of mentioning his past opposition to racial profiling in the same section of the site.  Of course, it’s entirely reasonable and correct to reject Obama’s views and find fault with the legislation he backed, but the entire story seems to be an exercise in “revealing” things about Obama that he’s quite happy to tell everyone about as it is.  Yes, Obama is wrong on this question as far as conservatives are concerned, but what did anyone expect?

Kurtz also makes a number of contrasts that don’t really show what he thinks they show.  For example, Kurtz writes:

Biographical treatments of Obama tend to stress the tenuous nature of his black identity-his upbringing by whites, his elite education, his home in Chicago’s highly integrated Hyde Park, personal tensions with black legislators, and questions about whether Obama is “black enough” to represent African Americans. These concerns over Obama’s racial identity are overblown. On race-related issues Obama has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago’s African-American politicians for years. 

Kurtz seems to miss entirely that it was to some significant degree because his position in the community and his identity were tenuous that he adopted conventional positions on government contract quotas and all the rest.  These other claims aren’t overblown–they help explain the difficulty he had in entering Chicago politics and the positions he had to take to make it here.  He couldn’t afford to do otherwise.  Kurtz does seem to recognize this later when he writes:

To the extent that Obama can be accused of having shaky “black credentials,” that very accusation pushes him to practice race-conscious politics all the more energetically.

But, of course, the point is that he could be and was accused of shaky credentials, most especially during his attempt to oust Bobby Rush in the House primary.  Not surprisingly, many of the episodes Kurtz uses to document Obama’s “race-conscious politics” come from the post-2000 period, but more remarkably Kurtz avoids discussing how Rush explicitly attacked Obama for his weaker ties to the community and how Rush used his mixed-race background against him.  Naturally, the episodes Kurtz mentions weren’t limited only to the post-2000 period, because Obama’s position in the black community had always been relatively weak and the 2000 primary revealed how weak it was.  Obviously, to shore up that position and to build the support that Obama would later use in his run for the Senate, Obama was not going to turn against policies that are fairly popular among the people he represented.  Besides, even Hyde Park liberals typically support the things mentioned in the story because they are liberals.  Imagine someone writing an “expose” that Mike Huckabee has supported home-schooling and covenant marriage, and then imagine the bemused, yawning reaction from conservatives to get some sense of how old most of this “news” is.   

Meanwhile, the admission that Obama made during the Senate primary that he was from the liberal wing of the party isn’t new information, since most profiles that have discussed that campaign include this detail, and it is made all the less remarkable by the fact that Obama declared that he was “no doubt progressive” in order to push back against the claim that he was “moving to the center.”  Of course, progressives have reason to doubt that claim, especially in the wake of the FISA bill, but it isn’t as if he is always reluctant to identify himself with the left.  It’s true that he usually eschews the liberal label these days, but then so do a lot of progressives, since progressive has become the preferred term for many on the left.  Oh, yes, and Obama also supports social welfare legislation–who could have guessed?        

As much of a critic of Obama as I have been, I find this objection to him absolutely ridiculous:

In other words, Obama is bipartisan so long as that means asking Republicans to take incremental steps toward his own broader goals.

Well, yeah, that’s usually what both sides in a legislature are trying to do–take incremental steps toward their own goals!  The worrisome thing about Obama’s attitude towards bipartisanship is not that he tries to advance his agenda incrementally (you might as well complain that he tries to win elections or likes to get good press), but that he seems to be so oriented towards consensus-building and belonging to a consensus position that he values bipartisanship almost as an end in itself and seems to believe that the problem in Washington is that there is too little of this accursed collaboration in general rather than too much of it being used for the wrong things.   

Finally, I don’t think the following claim is entirely true:

When it comes to compromising with the other side, however, Obama says “take a hike.”

It depends.  It is not simply a question of whether he will or won’t compromise with the “other side.”  What matters is whether taking a certain position will expose him to significant political risk and confrontation.  If it does, he will avoid it.  If working with the “other side” allows him to avoid political risk, he will be glad to do that, too, as his flip on the FISA bill reminds us.  In the end, Lizza’s assessment of Obama’s career holds up much better:

Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.  

That he accommodates himself to existing institutions to advance a broadly progressive domestic agenda is also no surprise to anyone who has looked at his policy proposals or heard what he says.

Joe Conason and David Ignatius are just two of the many observers expressing disbelief at McCain’s alleged transformation from fabled truth-telling man of honor to the candidate he is today, all of which is premised on the bizarre assumption that McCain was once a civil, respectful politician in the past and is now throwing that away in pursuit of power.  The most remarkable line comes from Ignatius’ column:

What’s damaging the McCain campaign now, I suspect, is that this fiercely independent man is trying to please other people — especially a Republican leadership that doesn’t really trust him.

Of course, the “fiercely independent” McCain spent the bulk of 1999 and the early months of 2000 (and many years after that) trying to please other people. The difference then was that Ignatius and other members of the Washington press corps were the ones he was trying to please and unironically, accurately referred to members of the media as his base.  During the 2000 campaign, he referred to the GOP establishment as the “evil empire,” which seemed perfectly fair and satisfactory to his boosters in the press because they thought this was simply a description of reality and not a slur.  Pretty much every “maverick” episode in McCain’s career has involved staking out a position in opposition to his party in the interests of attracting good press and cultivating a reputation as one of the “good” Republicans–the “noble, tolerant” McCain that Conason refers to in his piece–and he has done this by adopting a haughty, self-righteous tone as a champion of reform fighting against the forces of corruption (campaign finance) and bigotry (immigration “reform”) within his own party.  By endorsing the worst prejudices about his party held by his party’s political opponents (while enabling some of their genuinely worst attributes in his warmongering), he became renowned for his integrity, just as Republicans have been lauding Joe Lieberman for his character and courage for denouncing liberals, his own party and that party’s nominee in terms that perfectly fit GOP talking points. 

Implicit in this self-construction has been the claim that he is one of the reasonable few keeping the irrational masses on the right at bay, and he has built up enough credit with journalists over the years that he can align himself with the worst of the administration’s policies on Iraq and immigration and still be thought of as different from Bush.  Indeed, to the extent that his agreement with the administration on many major policies is acknowledged, it is usually framed as part of a story of how the “real” McCain lost his way in trying to satisfy his party, but these accounts often hold out the hope that the “real” McCain might still make a comeback before the end.  People will talk about McCain’s poor relations with conservatives and the party leadership as if he had nothing to do with causing them, and as if he had never launched an unfair or disreputable attack on an opponent or another person in his life, when the creation of his “maverick” image has been founded on portraying members of his party and the conservative movement according to the worst stereotypes and exploiting his opposition to these strawman positions as proof of his political courage.  That he now approves of taking the so-called “low road” against Obama is nothing new.  Indeed, by comparison with the treatment of some of McCain’s other opponents in policy debates, Obama is still being treated pretty easily.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Michael Brendan Dougherty questions Brooks’ lament of lost unipolarity, and Michael lands some solid blows.  I found this passage in Brooks’ column to be the most telling:

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem.

The real difficulty with multipolarity is not so much that there are more groups vetoing collective action as it is that many rising powers don’t agree with Washington or Brussels what the real problems are.  They veto collective action in one area or another because that “collective” action increasingly appears to be actions directed against their interests or the interests of their client states.  “Globosclerosis” is inevitable in a politically diverse world with hundreds of nation-states and multiple major powers.    

Officially, everyone solemnly intones that nuclear proliferation is undesirable and should be prevented, but the Iranian acquisition of nuclear technology does not appear to India or China as a threat.  Their perspective as rising powers that have more recently acquired their own nuclear arsenals means that even an Iranian bomb seems far more rational and justifiable to them than it does to our government.  At the same time, the real power and status that India has derived from its arsenal, such that our government has been trying to seal a nuclear deal with New Delhi in pretty obvious violation of the NPT, show every aspiring state that the way to be taken seriously by the U.S. is to possess this sort of power.   

What a multipolar world really shows is the limits of multilateral institutions.  During most of the Cold War, the U.N. did not provide much in the way of collective security because the member states were either divided between the two superpowers or organized under the Non-Aligned Movement, and after the Cold War the U.N. was able to provide meaningful collective security only when the remaining superpower backed the action.  Now that there are multiple new powers emerging in the world, the multilateral framework, which presupposes a consensus that will almost never exist among so many divergent interests, has been breaking apart.  This has been exacerbated by the consistent targeting of Russian and Chinese satellites for sanctions and attack, while leaving U.S. allies that have their own egregious records unscathed, but these are simply symptoms.  The problem, if you want to call it that, is that the artificial and unusual disparity of power between the U.S. and the rest of the world that occurred in the wake of WWII has been steadily narrowing, and it will continue to do so.  This is essentially a return to something more like a normal state of affairs after the extremely abnormal 20th century.

So what is the immediate cause of Brooks’ lament?  The failure (yet again) of the Doha round of global trade talks.  The Doha round has run into these problems before, memorably depicted in an Economist cover a few years ago, and the issues continue to be the same: developing countries want the major industrialized states to open up their markets more to their agricultural products, while the major industrialized states have very comfy farm protections and subsidies that they have no intention of changing very much.  How does Brooks portray the collapse of trade talks?  Like this:

The Doha round collapsed, despite broad international support, because India’s Congress Party did not want to offend small farmers in the run up to the next elections. Chinese leaders dug in on behalf of cotton and rice producers.

In other words, the Indian and Chinese governments were pursuing the interests of their farmers in a bid to open up more agricultural trade, which U.S. and European governments did not support to the degree that was being demanded.  So, in fact, the Doha round has failed yet again not so much because of rising powers and multipolarity, but rather because the established powers would have preferred to be able to impose their agenda on poorer states as they did in the past and refuse to make concessions necessary to conclude the negotiations successfully.  Of course, the established powers have legitimate interests as well, and they are answerable to their constituents back home, but they would like to continue to benefit from giving developing nations short shrift in the Uruguay round without paying a price for this in the new round of talks.  It is no wonder that the negotiations keep collapsing.  Brooks chides the Indian Congress-led government for not wanting to alienate small farmers, but this is entirely rational, since Congress came to power nationally on a wave of discontent with the BJP, whose “Shining India” economic progress did not apply very much to vast numbers of Indians. 

This reminds me of a point that Zakaria makes in The Post-American World when he marvels at the productivity of China and approvingly quotes a Chinese official, whose simple answer to addressing rural poverty was increased industrialization.  Zakaria then remarked:

When I have put the same question to Indian or Latin American officials, they launch into complicated explanations of the need for rural welfare, subsidies for poor farmers, and other such programs, all designed to slow down market forces and retard the historical–and often painful–process of market-driven industrialization.

As I said to myself when I read this, “Yes, but then the Indians and Latin Americans allow their people to vote!”  The day may come when China does have some form of elective government, and when that day comes we are probably going to see an enormous backlash against the kinds of policies that have been promoted for the last thirty years.  One of the most important factors in what Brooks calls “globosclerosis” (and what I might call states acting in their own interests) is democratization, which empowers all those who benefit least from globalization and encourages political opposition to continuing economic and trade practices that seem to serve the interests of multinationals and foreign countries more than the interests of one’s own country.  Whenever the majority is permitted a say in how economic and trade policies are set, there will always be resistance to ever-greater liberalization and free trade.  This has happened in every industrializing country, and will happen on an even larger scale as the vast majority of the world participates more and more fully in the global economy.    

The connection between “globosclerosis” and democracy becomes even more clear when you see another of Brooks’ complaints:

Europe’s drive toward political union has stalled.

This is a reference to the defeat of the reworked European constitution in the form of the Lisbon Treaty in the recent Irish referendum.  Consistently, whenever plans for closer European political union are put to a vote in member states, including some of the oldest members in France and the Netherlands, most of the voters refuse to accept it.  This “failure” stands out as the least worrisome of all the things Brooks mentions, and instead of lamenting the defeat of a political project most Europeans don’t really understand and don’t want when they do understand it we should be glad that an even more centralized, continental political apparatus has not prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic.  To frame this as a conflict between “strong narrow interests” and “diffuse, generalized interests” explains exactly why these things have failed and why, in certain cases, it is an undeniably good thing when considered as a matter of representing the people who will have to bear the costs and consequences of the policies in question.  One of the principal causes of opposition and resentment against globalization and the policies that promote it is the impression that these policies are set without respecting the wishes and interests of the people affected by them.  Obviously, everyone can’t get everything that they want, but there would be far fewer entrenched opponents of these policies if they were not so often advanced and defended with such obvious contempt for the interests of the citizens in their respective countries.

The poor approval ratings of various heads of government around the world can be explained much more readily by looking at each case and recognizing that Bush, Brown and Fukuda in particular are deemed to be either political or policy incompetents (or both).  Indeed, Fukuda’s opponents are gaining at his expense amid rising prices by exploiting anti-globalization sentiment.  These three leaders are unpopular because they and the policies they support are unpopular, and particularly in Japan it is the LDP’s support for free trade that is helping to do it in.  Obviously, in light of the resistance from democratic electorates to the very policies Brooks is defending, it makes absolutely no sense to say that a League of Democracies is the “best idea” out there right now.  A League of Democracies, assuming that it were not simply a vehicle for U.S. interventionism, would duplicate and perhaps even compound the difficulties current multilateral organizations are experiencing precisely because the organization’s members would have to answer to their voters at some point. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Matt and Ross have been discussing the rather strange question of whether Slate is a center-right publication, and Matt said most recently:

And I’ll admit that while I look at Slate all the time, I’m not a particularly thorough reader of it and the Mickey Kaus phenomenon looms large in my mind.

This is something that puzzles me about liberal views of Mickey Kaus.  Kaus has repeatedly said that he will vote for Obama, he was an early neoliberal (as those involved in the debate over the merits of neoliberalism last year will remember) and has worked at other such “center-right” publications as The New Republic and The Washington Monthly.  He has the habit of criticizing what he considers to be excesses and errors of those to the left of him, at least partly because this is simply what neoliberals do.  They are not usually in the habit of reinforcing liberal conventional wisdom when they find it lacking, but even neoliberals are center-left people.  Kaus’ refreshingly sensible opposition to so-called comprehrensive immigration reform and his concerns about the effects of mass immigration on social equality are, as far as I can tell, the main reasons why he is routinely accused of being a crypto-conservative, because people who are “really” on the left aren’t typically concerned about these things. Even his reasons for challenging the immigration status quo are rooted in his desire to promote social equality, which I assume most liberals would also want to promote.

Meanwhile, dissident conservatives who are on the right frequently attack shibboleths of the mainstream right, but we do so from a conservative perspective.  Even when our arguments are undermining some part of conventional wisdom on the right, we are not therefore mostly publishing liberal content.  It works the same way among liberals, too.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Update: Commenter Freddie has a good post at his own blog reflecting on his comments below.

Patrick Appel asks a good question about who will benefit from invoking race in the election, and as I said yesterday I tend to agree that this may cause a different reaction in the general electorate:

This line of attack on Obama’s opponents is not a new one, but the Obama campaign may be making a serious mistake in assuming that this attack will work as well in the general election as it did in the Democratic primary.

As a matter of how the media will treat the two candidates, however, I still think the politicization of race in the presidential contest almost certainly will fit into the already well-established narrative that has been in place since the earliest Democratic primaries.  According to that narrative, the Republicans are inevitably going to engage in race-baiting, and any negative ad or line of criticism that can be interpreted to support that will be given much more attention than would otherwise be the case.  That said, in a close election in an otherwise very pro-Democratic year, I can think of definite ways that this could still work to McCain’s disadvantage in the general election, since the perception that McCain was employing racist tropes in his campaign could drive up turnout and fundraising for Obama and it could eat away at his strangely enduring reputation as a moderate.  If Republicans engage in so-called “ricochet pandering,” by appealing to minorities in order to reassure white swing voters, a consistent portrayal of the McCain campaign as one that exploits racism will have the same ricochet effect and drive away swing voters in crucial states.  This is more or less in line with what Chuck Todd said.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Besides being paranoid, the idea that McCain’s genuinely weak “Celeb” ad draws from Triumph of the Will is remarkable for something else: its implicit contempt for modern Germans.  It is not much better than the pro-war German-bashing that took place during 2002-03 when war supporters frequently complained that the Germans had lost their former enthusiasm for conflict.  Both treat Germans in an essentialist way and try to reduce them to the most cartoonish stereotypes, as if a cheering throng of Germans in Berlin, c. 2008, must necessarily conjure up associations with Nazi rallies.  To assume this says more about the critics of the ad than about the people who made it.  As for the notion that the images from the ad resemble the techniques of Riefenstahl, one might as well accuse the television news directors who covered the event of imputing Hitlerism to Obama, since the footage and camera angles are all taken from the news broadcasts of the speech.  Obama supporters haven’t been this good at embarrassing their candidate with hysterical commentary since Orlando Patterson felt compelled to compare Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad to Birth of a Nation.      

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Despite its great importance for U.S. interests in Afghanistan and the region, the failed, rather clumsy attempt by the Pakistani civilian government to rein in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and place it under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior has not received nearly as much comment as it should.  Coming in the wake of the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul earlier this month, which was backed by elements within the ISI (detailed in the 7/28 TAC print edition), and the recent coordinated bombings in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, both the issuing and the reversal of the administrative order are particularly ominous.  Having attempted to assert control and been rebuffed under pressure from the military, the civilian government has shown its limitations and exposed itself to a backlash from the same forces that are trying to foment disorder in Afghanistan and India.  The inability of Gilani’s government to control the ISI is at the heart of the ongoing threat to the security of Afghanistan and the unreliability of Pakistan as an effective ally. 

In The Times of India, Prof. Sumit Ganguly of Indiana-Bloomington describes the extent of the problem:

The Pakistani military having wielded decades of political power has weakened every other institution within the Pakistani state. In aggrandising its extraordinary prerogatives from Ayub Khan to Yahya Khan to Zia-ul-Haq and most recently, Pervez Musharraf, it has used the ISI to serve a variety of political ends well beyond the tasks of espionage and counter-intelligence. Consequently, any civilian regime hoping to make the organisation more accountable will first have to think about how best to limit the privileges of the Pakistani army.

Until they can devise some institutional means to make the army more accountable to civilian authority, any attempts to control the activities of the ISI will not only be futile but dangerous.

The situation also calls for a reassessment of U.S. policies that disregard Pakistani sovereignty, whether they are advanced by President Bush or Sen. Obama, not least since PM Gilani has already declared this unacceptable.  Any association of his government with compromises of Pakistani sovereignty will further undermine civilian rule.  The recent attacks against Indian interests should also cause us to remember that the Pakistani military itself, and not simply rogue elements in the ISI, have been diverting American military aid to building up its conventional forces against India.  If the Pakistani military continues to use U.S. support in this way and if elements within the ISI continue to exploit the “war on terror” to pursue an anti-Indian agenda at the expense of U.S. interests, Washington will need to reconsider the level of military aid our government provides and Pakistan’s status as a major non-NATO ally.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Not enough has been said about John Schwenkler‘s fine TACessay on culinary conservatism, and unfortunately too much of what has been said has been ridiculous, so it is gratifying to see my Scene colleague Alan Jacobs taking up the subject in this first of two posts.  Before I say anything more about the essay itself, there is something that needs to be addressed whenever we try to discuss the relationship between food culture and philosophical and political persuasions.  Something that culinary conservatives and their good friends the “crunchy” cons and agrarians generally take for granted, as John notes in his essay, is that eating is a political act. 

This scandalizes and terrifies many modern conservatives because they seem to have a limited or debased understanding of what it means to say that something is a political act, and they tend to associate it for the most part with the government and the business of electioneering and passing legislation.  Were you to say that there is so much more to the life of a community, ta politika, than its government, laws and elections, these same conservatives would agree wholeheartedly and would probably make a point of saying admiringly that most people who would call themselves conservatives today are not activists and are concerned mostly with their families and churches.  Their conservative politics derives not from movement boosterism or extensive familiarity with the texts of the postwar American conservative canon, but from their habits and the virtues they try to cultivate in their own lives.  If you pressed these conservatives a bit more, they would acknowledge that it is better for families to eat together for many reasons, and many would recognize the integrative role that shared meals at religious celebrations have.  Some would even allow that it matters that the Eucharist is a re-enactment, or at the very least a commemoration, of the Lord’s last meal on earth.  Even so, to then say that it matters in some important way what they eat, where it comes from or how the animals and soil that provide them sustenance are treated is usually to lose much of their interest.  Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the language of unfettered desire and autonomy crops up: “I want what I want, and who are you to say otherwise?”  At least with many libertarians, this is to be expected, but it is a strange reflex for those who are supposed to prize restraint and wisdom. 

To say that eating is a political act worries conservatives because many seem to cling, oddly enough, to an old liberal conception of private, personal life that they wish to preserve free from outside interference, including ultimately the “interference” of neighbors, relatives and local community.  Where social conservatives are often keenly aware of the effects that individual choices concerning marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing have on society as a whole, there often seems to be a strange disconnect when it comes to eating, as if an act that ties us into an elaborate web of economic relationships has no greater significance and no other implications other than providing nourishment.  It is one kind of activity, perhaps the only kind, where many conservatives act as if the consequences of personal choices do not extend beyond the front door.

At the same time, eating as a political act is nonetheless also a question of how we are governed, whom we choose to empower and how we choose to govern ourselves.  As John says:

“Eating is an agricultural act,” writes Wendell Berry. But Slow Food International founder Carlo Petrini argues that it is also a political one—a deed no less significant than the ways we cast our votes. Hence even the smallest acts of resistance to the hegemony of the present system, where corporate representatives and industry-funded scientists at public universities collaborate with government officials on regulatory policies and nutritional guidelines, are crucial steps in recovering local culture and reconstituting our “little platoons.” This will nurture the ability to govern—or resist being governed.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

The campaign controversy of the moment seems to be whether McCain has been telling lies about his opponent, with the additional accusation from the opposing camp that he is also engaged in race-baiting.  Of course, he is telling lies, and he isn’t engaged in race-baiting, but in this bizarre election cycle you can be sure that he will be rewarded or at least forgiven for the former and then punished for something that he isn’t doing.  This is exactly what happened during the primaries when McCain lied about Romney’s views on the war and Obama’s campaign and supporters denounced the Clintons for exploiting racism, and it is all happening again just as it did earlier in the year.  It is happening again mainly because this is how the two campaigns seem to operate when they are in closely-contested elections, which means we will continue to see more of this until November.

Trivial as they seem, these episodes sum up both campaigns and the media’s treatment of both remarkably well.  As he did in the primaries, McCain is simply making things up about his opponent’s positions and actions, and just as his campaign did during the primary fight against Clinton Obama and his supporters are pushingfantastic claims that McCain is exploiting racism.  (As with Clinton, McCain may be benefiting from prejudice, but attempts to show that they are actively exploiting it have been laughably weak.)  Remember the memo the Obama campaign circulated documenting the instances of how the Clintons allegedly politicized racism?  Then as now, the things that have provoked criticism have typically been entirely or mostly unrelated to race, and even when there is some small connection it requires hysteria and hypersensitivity to find something malevolent in that connection.  This line of attack on Obama’s opponents is not a new one, but the Obama campaign may be making a serious mistake in assuming that this attack will work as well in the general election as it did in the Democratic primary.  Regardless, it will receive more attention and gain more traction in the press on the assumption that they have been using all year long, which is that whatever race-baiting the Clintons were supposedly employing, the GOP would use it even more extensively. 

Back in January, the media criticized McCain for his lies about Romney, but ultimately forgave him on the twisted grounds that he doesn’t enjoy lying, and so he remained their hero.  The same will happen concerning McCain’s lies about Obama.  Meanwhile, McCain will suffer more damage from sustained media criticism that he is supposedly trafficking in racist tropes, despite the self-evident absurdity of the charge.  The phony controversy about the alleged racism in McCain’s horrible ads will distract attention from their insipid quality, but it will still generally work to McCain’s detriment if journalists accept the idea that McCain’s campaign is trying to promote or use racism in the election.  If their response to the accusations against the Clintons is any indication, many will accept this idea, and Obama will profit from this sort of scurrilous charge.  One thing seems likely: as I guessed a few months ago, the election will turn heavily on the biography and character of the candidates, and it will therefore be one of the more divisive and unpleasant general election campaigns we have experienced. 

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish

Over the course of the last few months, Rasmussen has been tracking attitudes about voting for a black candidate for President.  What they have been finding is that the public is gradually becoming more willing to support such a candidate, but what is most striking in the three surveys they have done is how constant and relatively great the unwillingness to support a black candidate has been in the age group you probably least expect.  According to thethreesurveys, 18-29 year olds are now relatively less willing to support a black candidate than voters from other age groups.  While resistance to supporting a black candidate has dropped in every other age group since February, and overall stands at just 8%, it remains basically unchanged among the youngest voters. 

While older generations report slightly increased unwillingness among friends, family and co-workers (which is the pollster’s way of trying to get around respondents who self-censor), approximately one-fifth (22%) of 18-29 year olds state their own unwillingness to vote for a black presidential candidate.  When asked about the willingness of friends, family and co-workers, the figure for “no” rises to 31%, which is the largest percentage in any age group.  Older voters will tend to say they are less sure about the attitudes of friends and family, but there is evidence of more explicit resistance among 18-29 year olds in both responses.   

Of course, roughly three-quarters of this group say that they are willing, and it is among these young voters that Obama has drawn many of his most enthusiastic supporters.  Even so, what we seem to be seeing is that unwillingness to support a black candidate is actually much stronger and more enduring among young voters, who are much more likely now to say this openly.  This would seem to undermine conventional narratives that “Millennials” are less concerned about matters of race than their elders, and it may be that the greater diversity of Millennials is a cause of this.

Cross-posted at The Daily Dish