If Hillary Clinton was a white man

By Joe Sims

I was sitting with some friends yesterday and discussing the significance of the end of the Democratic primaries. One commented that the general election was going to be really difficult for the presumptive nominee who in his view had failed to get any bounce upon winning the nomination. I was a little surprised by his pessimism and sent him an AP poll in this morning's news that should put aside those fears. The AP news story says in part:

“The Gallup daily tracking poll Tuesday showed Obama with a 7 percentage-point lead nationally over presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, Obama's widest lead since Gallup started the general election polling in March.

McCain was leading Obama by 1 percent early last week, but Obama started to tick up in the surveys after he defeated Hillary Clinton for the nomination.The latest reading from Gallup showed Obama with 48 percent to McCain's 41 percent. The poll was taken June 7-9, of 2,633 registered voters. The margin of error was 2 percentage points.”

My friend hasn't responded so far, however clearly he is influenced by the doubts about Obama's chances among the general electorate because of fears influenced by racism. The reasoning goes: if he can't carry the white working-class male and female vote among Democrats, how can he possibly do well enough to compensate among independents and moderate leaning Republicans in the general election?

The ideological fault line in this method of thinking is in its analysis of the white working-class vote. The problems lies in two areas; first in the very conception of the working class itself and with it a gross misconception of gender and class and the ways in which they worked themselves out in the Democratic primaries.

On the first issue, as Erwin Marquit points out in a recent article in PA, “Overcoming Unscientific Concepts of Working Class,” narrow views of productive labor act as theoretical brakes and lends to faulty analysis and action. Fact is, “middle-class” income brackets that voted for Obama, even if composed of academics and other professionals are largely working-class by today's standards. When this is combined with the “blue collar “vote of Black, Brown and white workers, Obama clearly held his own when compared to Clinton.

The gender issue adds to this in a unique way. The women's vote in general was pro-women's equality. The vote of white women was not anti-Obama in this sense, but rather for seeing a woman become president. In addition, it's a truism that women due to their experience of oppression as women tend to vote “better” than men on most questions and come down on the democratic side of the fence. And did I mention that most of those women are working class?

I asked my friend, “What if Hillary Clinton had been a white man?” He looked at me sort of dumbfounded. But think about it; clearly it would have been a very different primary. Why? Because first, as suggested above, Obama, would likely have won a majority of the women's vote, as the absence of a female candidate would not have drawn away the galvanizing force of the insurgent female ballots. As a result, Obama both because of the his qualities as a candidate and due to the nature of the political moment might well have won a landslide. As Bob Kerrey a Clinton supporter pointed out in a Sunday New York Times op ed, he even may well have won a landslide against Bill Clinton himself and any other Democratic candidate of the last 50 years. He wrote:

"If Barack Obama had been born 10 years earlier and had been a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1992, neither I nor Bill Clinton would have defeated him...
The hard truth is that from the moment Mr. Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10, 2007, Mrs. Clinton was facing a candidate with greater skills than any candidate her husband had ever faced in his life."

Kerrey may overemphasize individual skills and suffer from a "great-man-in-history syndrome." Still the qualities of the candidate, along with the nature of the political moment is such that a combination of the working-class vote (which by way is black, brown and white, male and female), the democratic upsurge among women, African Americans and Latinos, the addition of huge numbers of new voters to polls combined with the anti-right-wing sentiment among the broad public will result in a decisive victory in November. Need it be said that white men in general and white working-class men in particular are part of this upsurge? (Lest anyone conclude as some on the left do, that white working class men are somehow the source of the problem. The Virginia primary should have disabused anyone of that notion). Today states that formerly voted Republican are now too in play. The man has met the moment and helped create a new movement: and it's here to stay.

Barack Obama and the working class

The media loves to talk about how the working class isn't behind Barack Obama, or at least the whites in the working class. Of course, they ignore the fact that more than 9 in 10 African Americans and Latinos are working class, and that the millions of whites who have already cast their votes for Obama are not all capitalists – birkenstocks and lattes aside.

It is convenient for them to ignore the 17 million working class whites, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders, all across the country who have made Barack Obama the presumptive Democratic nominee and will be there on November 4th full of enthusiasm and joy to make him the next president.

Yesterday in Oregon, which is 85% white, for example, Obama won 57% of whites. 26% of Oregon voters were members of "union households" and by a margin of almost two-to-one, Obama collected their support. He won voters who live in families that earn less than $50,000 by 9 points.

Today, Obama collected the endorsement of the United Mine Workers of America, which has thousands of members in Appalachia where Obama supposedly lacks support from white Democratic voters.

In a press statement, UMWA President Cecil E. Roberts said, "Senator Obama shares the values of UMWA members and our families. He understands and will fight for the needs our members have today and the hopes our members have for a secure future for themselves and their families," union president Cecil E. Roberts said in a press statement.

"Senator Obama will fight to preserve American jobs, not ship them overseas in greater and greater numbers," Roberts said. "Senator Obama will make sure that the nation's mine safety and health enforcement agency actually enforces the law, instead of coddling mine operators who repeatedly and willfully violate the law."

UMWA is the 9th AFL-CIO affiliated union to back Obama. So far, 13 labor unions whose memberships total more than 7 million people have backed him.

Clearly, Obama has the ability to bring different sections of the electorate and the working class together to win this thing. The media has to stop showing its ignorance and biases by trying to divide up the working class by race, as if we don't share many of the same aspirations and the same aim to end the Bush years and to prevent more of the same from John McCain.

Democratic race: pledged delegate contest is over