If Obama Loses: A Response to Jacob Weisberg
By Bud White on August 27, 2008 at 9:00 AM in Bamboozling, Barack Obama, Current Affairs, Democratic Nomination, Donna Brazile, Flip Flopping, Gender Bias, Hillary Clinton, Huffington Post, Iowa, John McCain, Media Bias, Misogyny, Pennsylvania, Race, Race Card, Racism, Sexism, White Working Class, Women
In 1993, feminist alt-rocker Liz Phair released Exile in Guyville, a song-to-song response to The Rolling Stones’ superb Exile on Main Street.
I’ve been thinking about Liz Phair’s response to the rockin’ but boorish Rolling Stones after reading Jacob Weisberg’s If Obama Loses: Racism is the Only Reason McCain Might Beat Him in Slate. Unlike Phair, I won’t attempt a point-by-point rebuttal; Weisberg’s piece is so riddled with distortions and hyperbole that a laundry list argument cannot summarize my feelings.
Weisberg’s article is so bad on so many levels that it’s amazing it was published at all, but it does fit with the media’s love affair with Obama. It’s a deceptive piece of writing and it relies on faulty logic, which I show below. But of course that is not an accident. A strident media partisan like Weisberg cannot rely on facts. So let’s start from the beginning:
John McCain, a sub-par Republican nominee with a list of liabilities longer than a Joe Biden monologue. Obama has built a crack political operation, raised record sums, and inspired millions with his eloquence and vision. McCain has struggled with a fractious campaign team, lacks clarity and discipline, and remains a stranger to charisma. Yet at the moment, the two of them appear to be tied. What gives?
Weisberg overstates the effectiveness of Obama’s operation. The trip to Europe, the faux presidential seal, his many policy reversals, and his disastrous debate performance at Saddleback are not mentioned.
Now notice how Hillary’s name is not mentioned. Nor the fact that 18 million voters chose her, approximately 200,000 more than chose Obama. Obama did not win a decisive victory. He was pulled over the finish line by Reid and Pelosi.
In fact, Obama as a brand has actually been declining — if you look at primary results and polls — since March. McCain, on the other hand, has actually run a surprisingly nimble operation, releasing ads which deflate the self-important Obama.
He continues:
If you break the numbers down, the reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He does so for a simple reason: the color of his skin.
This would be a shocking conclusion if it were true. Older white voters, Weisberg is telling us, are racists. What’s his evidence?
Five percent of white voters acknowledge that they, personally, would not vote for a black candidate.
Five percent? Repeat. Five percent. Is Weisberg innumerate or does he think we’re stupid? That means 95 percent will not take race into consideration. Does this satisfy Weisberg? Of course not.
Five percent surely understates the reality. In the Pennsylvania primary, one in six white voters told exit pollsters race was a factor in his or her decision. Seventy-five percent of those people voted for Clinton. You can do the math: 12 percent of the Pennsylvania primary electorate acknowledged that it didn’t vote for Barack Obama in part because he is African-American.
Here he assures us that the number he just cited is wrong. Why did he cite the five percent to then just swat it down? Because it doesn’t serve the necessary condition of his argument; in fact, it refutes his thesis. Weisberg’s logic is not just twisted, it’s fabricated. Furthermore, just because Pennsylvania voters said race was a factor does not mean they view it as a problem. Indeed, the language of the polling is so vague that the race factor may have been Pennsylvanians voting for Obama because of his race. Does Weisberg mention Obama’s victory in lily-white Iowa ?, a state which is less diverse than Pennsylvania. No. Nor does he mention any of the deep-red and very white caucus states where Obama won. Because, as he says with a bit of sarcasm, “Obama may be too handsome, brilliant, and cool to be elected.” You see, Obama is really so wonderful that it must be racism.
Not once does Weisberg mention the sexism and misogyny directed at Hillary. Not once does he mention Hillary’s decidedly blue-collar appeal, her populist economic message, and the older, white female voters who fell hard for her. No, these ladies (and men) must be racists.
Except for health care, Weisberg does not consider issues important to older white voters:
You may or may not agree with Obama’s policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change.
He is silent on national security and terrorism, international relations, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, job creation, and fuel prices. Weisberg’s litany, like Obama’s, is a distinctly Whole Foods Nation brand of liberalism, and it fails to address the economic insecurities of the poor and middle class. The blogger Anglachel writes:
Where has Obama lost ground among Democratic voters? In the populations most endangered by the faltering economy and the long term erosion of socio-economic standing. He did not address what mattered most to them, which was their increasing vulnerability to the ordinary dangers of life – insurance, health care, retirement, wages, job security, housing. To fail to do this was what makes Obama come across as elitist.
McCain is talking about drilling to reduce gas prices, and charging Obama with wanting to raise taxes. This message is gaining traction with many working Americans. As Anglachel puts it:
The [Obama] wing is all too enamored of its own moral superiority on race, too contemptuous of the Bubbas and the Bunkers, to make the slightest move to win back and thus defend this constituency.
Weisberg utterly fails to prove that the race is tied because of racism.
So let’s talk about what a vote for Obama actually signals: voting for Obama is condoning a culture that hates women (Keith Olbermann’s idea for Beating Hillary: Literally Beating Hillary). It’s a tacit acceptance for the media and the Democratic establishment giving preference to a far less qualified man over a much more qualified woman. It’s telegraphing to our daughters — to all women — that a man is rightfully at the front of the line, regardless if he lost nearly every important state and the popular vote. It’s telling our daughters — and all women — that violent imagery against a female candidate is acceptable if it benefits the male candidate. It is the familiar salt-in-the-wound for millions of women, the majority of the Democratic Party, that bullying and force — by the media, the liberal blogs, by the Democratic Party — is the way to crush a woman who tries to achieve too much.
Voting for Obama is to support a candidate who listens to and publicly references music which celebrates the degradation and abuse of women.
Voting for Obama is condoning race-baiting, like Weisberg’s. It’s accusing Hillary of suggesting that she was waiting for Obama to be assassinated because she mentioned RFK’s assassination in reference to the length of past campaigns when the media was trying to force her out; it’s having your surrogates imply that President Clinton’s remarks about Obama’s Iraq statements was racist (even producing a memo describing the plan), and it’s using coded language like “bamboozled” to mostly African Americans audiences in order to dislodge their support from the Clintons.
Voting for Obama is to embrace using race as a divisive strategy in a Democratic campaign.
Voting for Obama is being party to a rigged election. It condones voter intimidation, caucus fraud, and gaming your opponent’s states. It’s voting for outright bias by Party leaders like Dean, Pelosi, and Brazile. It’s an intentional violation of the one person, one vote ideal.
Voting for Obama is embracing intentional voter disenfranchisement.
Weisberg insists that Obama has a progressive agenda. But there’s nothing in the way Obama conducts his campaigns that would give us that idea. Many of us, Hillary supporters like myself, will vote for McCain because Obama’s treatment of Hillary goes against everything we believe in. And I want the Democratic Party to repudiate his tactics, and their own. Obama’s supporters must, some day, listen carefully to the very real reasons of why we’re angry, and they need to examine their consciences over their silence on the sexism towards Hillary and Obama’s race-baiting strategy.
Weisberg is wrong: Obama may lose because he conducted a despicable primary campaign, and he failed to offer a compelling economic message during the General Election.
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