A BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE - August 4, 2008

Black Man in the White House, a paradigmal American phantasm, has entertained the audience in futuristic blockbusters, apocalypse fantasies, and culture-contrast comedies. A dark-skinned President provides colorful background in a future-placed narration (“The Fifth Element”, “Idiocracy”, “Deep Impact”); acts as a tertiary “cut-and-paste” dedicated public servant (“24”); or refreshes the fretful, fatigued, anxiety-ridden White middle class with the uninhibited vivacious energy of the ghetto (“Head of State”).
 

Barack Obama’s starting position was reminiscent of a Zucker-Abrahams comedy: a Black guy whose last name reminds of Osama bin Laden, and middle name of Saddam Hussein, with ambiguous Muslim connections and a declared history of alcohol, marijuana and cocaine abuse, endeavors to run for the President in the post-9/11 America. However, it was the Illinois senator’s campaign that developed the most successful mix of the highly demanded ‘unconventionality’ and the obligatory ‘professionalism’.
 

Senator Obama’s unexpected success produced an optimistic reassessment of race relation in the US . The several million Caucasians who voted Obama in the Democratic primaries are now widely seen as the most attitudinally representative part of the 220 million White Americans. The vote distribution, however, dissipates the overly optimistic picture; experience of racial segregation is generally in a firm negative correlation with preference for Obama, and Caucasian groups with greater exposure to segregation, - the elderly and the Southerners, - exhibit the most ‘anti-Obama’ voting pattern.
 

WHITE FLIGHT
 

A study of the exit polls shows that Senator Obama’s and Senator Clinton’s electorates exhibit considerable discrepancies in age, race, education, residence (city-suburb), and geography (North-South). When we zoom in the nucleus of Clinton ’s electorate, - elderly Caucasian blue collars living in almost exclusively White suburbs, - it is hard not to see “White Flight” written across it. The “White Flight” was a long-term migration trend whereas lower and middle class Caucasians were leaving the “darkening” cities for the whiter suburbs. It hardly was an organized resistance to desegregation (although racist sentiments inevitably spurred the dynamic); however, irrespective of the reasons, the result has been the slowing down of racial integration and the preservation of large racially non-integrated White populations. While certainly not homogenous in racial attitudes, these populations doubtlessly carry a residue of segregation; to many older White Americans their Black compatriots remain the socially but not intimately accepted Other. And politics is often a pretty intimate thing.

 
AGE: THE SEGREGATION FACTOR

 
The age discrepancy between the White electoral contingents of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is too big to be monocausal. A part of this radical Caucasian generational divorce between the pro-Obama youth and the pro-Clinton retirees is attributable to the all-American factors that we see at work in other groups. However, only among the Caucasians age becomes the decisive factor with Obama winning the under 30 White vote almost everywhere including Clinton’s home state of New York, and Clinton winning the over 60 age group almost everywhere including Obama’s home state of Illinois.

 
Far from a member of an underground “power to the people” group, a pop-star, or a youthful nonconformist, neither a maverick nor a dissident, Barack Obama is a conventional establishment figure. He has no immediate generational, cultural, behavioral salience to attract the youth and freak off the elderly. Just like Senator Clinton. Why, then, is this age polarization?

 
MEMORY VOTE
  

Some vote for Hillary Clinton in remembrance of the “good old times” of her husband’s reign, of which younger citizens do not have mature recollections. However, such memories are present in the 30-59 age groups whose choice pattern is far less pro-Clinton than that of the 60+ group. We’ve detected an age-bound variable other than the “memory vote”.

 
“EXPERIENCE”
 

There was the discourse of Clinton ’s “experience” vs. Obama’s “change/hope/inspiration” where the older, experience-oriented people prefer the more experienced Clinton, and the young are animated by the ‘wind of change’ emanated by Obama. That theory ignores a salient fact: there were far more experienced candidates in the Democratic primaries - Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd. The New Mexico governor Richardson has plenty of the most urgently required experience, - productively talking to the “rogue” regimes; he successfully dealt with Saddam Hussein, Cuba, and North Korea, negotiating release of American and other prisoners; Richardson was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; he served as the U.S. Secretary of Energy (seems a rather relevant résumé entry with the skyrocketing oil prices); and, obviously, on top of that, he has the perennially important governor’s experience of running a large and racially diverse state, - budget, revenues, roads, schools, undocumented immigrants, etc. It will be difficult to find an equally rounded and relevant résumé. Yet the experience-coveting elderly voters remained unimpressed. Senior senator Biden also excels Hillary Clinton in experience, - he was already in the Senate when she still was at the university, - and he also failed to convert his experience into votes.
 

What’s more, the relatively “inexperienced” but undoubtedly White John Edwards fared comparatively well among senior Caucasians, beating Obama in the White 60+ age group in Iowa and South Carolina . In the latter state, Obama got 52% of the White 18-29 age group ( Clinton received 27% and Edwards 21%), and only 15% of the 60+ age group (Clinton and Edwards got 42% each).
 

THE SEGREGATION RESIDUE
 

Clearly, the memories of the “good old” 1990s and the “experience attraction” do not explain the gigantic age rift of the Democratic primaries. We can throw many explanations into this age gap between the Clinton and Obama electorates. But they won’t cover it all without the most visible one – skin color.
  

I am not talking here about the Ku Klux Klan. Like any complex phenomenon, racial attitudes form a gradualist continuity of a spectrum rather than the abruptness of a watershed. On the one side of this spectrum are sharp saturated colors of overt enmity and belief in bio-racial determinism; on the other side are pallid evasive hues of undetected feelings and long-established reflexes. Between “pure racist” and “pure non-racist”, there is a long gamut of tricky and blurred gradations in which many Americans reside.
  

People who were raised in a harshly segregated environment encountering racism at every societal level, - state law, school, job, church, family, - would often be conditioned to have the “racial reflex” of maintaining social distance from the Other. Some would overcome this “reflex”; others would not. Obviously, this concern with maintaining social distance was almost exclusively a White phenomenon; Afro-Americans developed the opposite urge because all the social assets they aspired, - education, health care, wages, housing, status, - were on the other side of the segregation border, and improving Black wellbeing implied moving into the White world.
 

It is impossible to deny that many Caucasians who were raised in segregation and lived in the “White Flight” environment, strongly prefer to continue the “Whites Only” situation, - in the family, in the neighborhood, and in the politics.
 

THE HIP-HOP GENERATION
  

By the 90s, America attained a fair degree of racial integration, and was quickly progressing further. Percentage of interracial marriages was rising, as well as the share of racially mixed school classes, various partnerships and collaborations. The rapidly changing pop culture was both a symptom of racial integration and a powerful motor thereof. It was hip-hop that became, in a sense, a generational hallmark.
 

The Hip-Hop culture achieved what naturally was beyond the reach of the civil rights movement:

- it created a self-referential Black culture outside of apology, victimization, and imitation;
- it presented Black as basic and central rather than deviant and peripheral;
- it created an image of Blackness not through repulsion or compassion but presenting Black as strong,

   successful, fashionable, enviable;
- for the first time in history, it made the mainstream White youth emulate fashions and manners of the

   Black ghetto.

 
The unashamedly Black, authentically ghetto-ish, unmitigated, un-Whitened characters have for the first time occupied the central podium of American mass culture. They may appear vulgar, violent and misogynistic, yet, with their multimillion armies of Caucasian fans, they most definitely “transcended race” long before Barack Obama endeavored to do that.

 
Obama’s ideologically staunchest White supporters may not be the greatest hip-hop fans. Many of them are upper-middle class Americans, university students or young professionals who have reservations about hip-hop’s treatment of women, and they came to embrace racial integration not through the mass culture but through the liberal left-leaning ideologies. However, the primary force changing racial attitudes has been the emotion-appealing mass culture rather than the reason-appealing ideologies.
 

ELECTION OF THE ANTI-BUSH
   

The newest episode of the endless sequel of the Bush administration public relations disasters is the Scott McLellan memoir; it is widely interpreted as an insider confirmation of much of the criticism leveled against the White House. The name of the 43rd president has become so synonymous to “failure” that even Republican office-seekers had to distance themselves from the Bush administration. What concerns the Democrats, their primaries essentially were an election of an anti-Bush. The Democratic, together with the Libertarians and left-leaning Independents (who also partook in the Democratic primaries) compiled a long list of real and perceived Bush failures: the slowing economy, gas prices, home foreclosures, Abu Graib and Guantanamo scandals, bin Laden, eavesdropping, global warming, border security, stem cell research, landmines issue, inadequate involvement in the Arab-Israel peace process, the hurricane Katrina handling, the underperforming education system, but most importantly the Iraq invasion, and the state of healthcare. The liberal America was looking for a leader as distant from the Bush paradigm as possible. Moreover, the entire political elite, the “BROKEN WASHINGTON” comprised of the corrupted dynastical duopoly where Democrats are increasingly indistinguishable from Republicans, has become the public enemy #1, for both the left and the right. Among the viable Democratic candidates, it was Barack Obama who held a complete monopoly over the highly demanded political hypostasis.
  

Hillary Clinton killed her presidential dream on October 10, 2002, by voting for the authorization of use of force against Iraq . Given the extremely close contest in the Democratic primaries, and the salience of the Iraq issue, we can be certain that it was her initial position on Iraq that eventually sank her candidacy. Too many liberals refused to forget Hillary’s complacency, if not complicity, in the drive to war, while Obama’s early and principled opposition to the invasion became his springboard.
  

Next, the New York senator also lost the Iran question. Polls repeatedly show that Obama’s position for directly meeting the Iranian leadership is far more popular among the Democratic voters than Clinton ’s position of withholding such contact. Obama’s position on talking to other “enemies”, - Cuba , Syria , and North Korea , - was also shared by the bulk of the Democratic voters.
 

Hillary Clinton was beaten on the NAFTA issue as well; the Clintons couple is widely associated with the unpopular trade agreement whilst Obama had the advantage of claiming his long-term opposition to it.
The personality issue was another battlefield to witness a crushing defeat of Hillary Clinton. The wife of possibly the most charismatic U.S. president since Kennedy, Hillary was widely perceived as “inauthentic”, “fake”, devoid of true convictions, and “flip-flopping”; she stood no chance in the contest of charisma and authenticity with Obama.
  

Obama owns the ‘antiwar’ trademark in the U.S. politics, and that’s currently the top-selling brand. He shines in his “propheticism” as the man who foresaw disaster where his rivals expected triumph. His policy positions are shared by the Democratic electorate; he has the aura of the “real one” uncorrupted by the “broken Washington ”; his authenticity, although increasingly challenged towards the end of the primaries, was perceived to be way above that of his major rivals.
 

And so, with all the trump cards in his hands, owning every bestselling trademark in the U.S. politics, why did Obama lose the popular vote, winning the delegates by a faint margin? There has to be a sober realization that Obama’s success per se is hardly a symptom of the post-racial era; a better indicator is the ratio of Obama’s electoral assets to his electoral results. Judged on the basis of this indicator, America remains a country where skin color still holds political value.

  
Yuriy Krynytskyy

---------------

Author of the article holds a M.A. degree in Conflict Studies from the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a former fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. Mr. Krynytskyy also served as one of the press secretaries for the People's Movement Party in Ukraine.

---------------