Obama, Race, and White Men

I had a frankly disturbing conversation with a family member last night that indicates to me that Barack Obama might have problems if he defeats Hillary for the nomination and proceeds on to face John McCain in the general election. This relative is nominally a Democrat (though he supported Perot on at least one of that Texan's Quixotic runs in the 1990s), but he's also pretty conservative. And last night while we were talking on the phone, he asked me what I thought about the presidential race. I indicated my support for Obama, at which point the floodgates opened up. My kin had not done "a lot of research" but "things that he's seen on the internet," mostly in the form of emails he has received from his other conservative white make buddies has led him to believe that he cannot support Obama. Naturally these email rumblings are the half-baked conspiracies and meaningless yet somehow portentous symbolism of the red meat right: Obama took his Senate oath on the Koran, attended a Madrassa, refuses to salute the flag and of course does not wear the flag pin on his lapel. These issues range from the flat-out wrong to the idiotic. They have nothing to do with whether or not he ought to be president.

My relative, of course, claimed to have an open mind about things, but he did not. His talking points were the same twenty minutes into the conversation as they were when it started. And this is what Obama is going to be up against when it comes to a vast swath of conservative whites, even those from his own party, but especially from Republicans and Independents: No one will flat-out say why they really won't support Obama, which is that he is a black man, but rather will instead come up with any excuse other than race to allow them to do what they are disinclined to do. John McCain is going to get a lot of votes from people who would never overtly say that they do not want to support a black candidate, but who do not want to support a black candidate. My relative's rationale for not liking Obama is akin to the reasons why he does not like Tiger Woods: "Just a feeling," "he seems arrogant" (this from someone who loved Larry Bird, hardly the humlest of athletes), "there is just something about him." This is racism with plausible denial.

David Paul Kuhn has an article at real Clear Politics that argues that men will represent a vital swing vote in this election, and that right now Clinton and Obama are splitting this vital constituency. he goes a long way toward complicating the idea of white men as unreconstructed racists, but as with any assessment like this one, Kuhn fails to take into account that it will only take small percentage of these men who actually are uncomfortable with the idea of a black President (or a woman) to defect to McCain when they otherwise would have voted Democrat this year to swing things to McCain. It will not take a whole lot to swing enough of my working-class family member and his friends away from Obama because of that "feeling," and the concomitant willingness to buy all sorts of crazy theories to help rationalize those feelings. In our generally split electorate all it will take is a relative handful -- maybe one out of every ten -- of the people who open their email accounts and hear that Obama took his oath of office on the Koran to use that as their safety outlet to forswear Obama's candidacy without acknowledging the true driving force behind their willingness to believe so readily easily refutable rumors and innuendo.

To his full credit McCain has rejected this sort of politics. But much will be done in his name come the summer and fall. It remains to be seen whether the many good things happening with Obama's campaign will be able to overcome the prejudices that only a fool, a bigot, or a naif could deny still exist in American society.