I was watching MSNBC this afternoon when they had their political director Chuck Todd on for a segment. Usually, Mr. Todd provides the standard look at some poll numbers or data. It is pretty straightforward stuff, but today he said something that got me thinking. Todd said that if Barack Obama won in Mississippi by 20 or more points tonight, it would provide evidence that he had made progress with the state’s white voters. There are two possible connotations to his statement. One, that Mississippi is still a racist state where white people won’t vote for a black man, or that Obama is the black candidate, and as such isn’t very appealing to most white people.
I highly doubt that Todd was trying to offend the state of Mississippi, so it is pretty safe to conclude that he was talking about Obama. Democratic voters rejected the idea of Barack Obama as the “black candidate†when Bill Clinton floated it in South Carolina, but many pundits seem to have embraced the idea that Obama is a candidate that can only win where there are large pockets of African American voters. (Apparently, Iowa didn’t count). The question is why it is ok for Barack Obama to be considered the candidate of African Americans, but nobody refers to Hillary Clinton as the candidate of older white women? Each candidate has a natural constituency, but only Obama has been labeled and limited by his popularity with that group of voters.
The linguist George Lakoff has written two books on the use of language and political framing. One of his main points is that a debate between two parties is won once one side accepts the terminology of the other as fact. Although the Clintons attempt to frame Obama as the black candidate has been consistently rejected by voters, perhaps it succeeded with their other target audience, the media. The media seems to be buying into the idea that Obama’s success should be measured by his appeal to white voters.
Barack Obama will win Mississippi by a fairly large margin tonight, but some could choose to devalue his victory because in their view he didn’t get enough white votes. I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize that there were different categories of votes based on a person’s race. I foolishly was under the assumption that a vote was a vote, and that they all counted equally. I am tired of the politics of division. For too long we have allowed politicians in both parties distract us based on what makes us different. What about the values that we share as a nation? I do not see Clinton and Obama as white and black. They are candidates, and as such neither one of them deserve to be devalued on the basis of race or gender.
3 users commented in " How the Media has Labeled Barack Obama the “Black Candidate†"
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI just want to say that the Mississippi election tonight shows who is more racist, Black voters. All over the Country Obama has got 80 to 90 percent of the black vote and no one says anything about how the black voters are forgeting what Bill Clinton did for the African American community and the media took his comments about Jesse Jackson and made them into something that it wasnt. Even Jesse Jackson said that it wasn’t racist to point out that he had won by winning the black vote in South Carolina. I say that if the Black voters are going to be racist and just vote for Obama for being black then its only fair that the white voters take as much pride in their first white woman nominee and go 90-10 for Hillary. This is so disheartening to see how the black vote has abandoned the Clinton’s and showed the real racism in the Black community.
This commentary is dead on. Obama won Iowa, Wisconsin, Wyoming, etc, where blacks voters are few but the media highlights only states where black votes were high. They fail to mention that Hillary also got most of the white votes in Mississippi, for intance. The media led by CNN is throwing spanners in the wheels of the Democratic primaries. Like someone said, if Obama were a white man he would have clenched the nomination by now. Obama has tried to be calm warding off negative attacks, rumors and smears. The situation is gradually destroying the party. Above all I see a weak leadership in the DNC. In the end it is not the Democratic party that would have lost, if the GOP wins, but the people yearning for change
Let’s not forget the Rush Limbaugh factor. Limbaugh has been urging Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in order to “bloody” Obama and to keep the Democratic race going and to hurt the party and give McCain a boost. Chris Matthews reported that exit polls showed that 24% of Hillary’s Mississippi votes came from white Republicans. This means that Hillary’s numbers are lower than stated, and that the Republicans are more afraid of Obama as an opponent than Hillary. I have to agree with them, as I will not vote for Hillary should she be the nominee, and I have been a life-long Democrat.
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