What happened? Barack Obama’s win in Iowa generated a widespread sense of pride, the press reporting all variety of “man on the street” testimonials to feelings of optimism in the wake of the victory. Whatever we all personally thought of Obama as a candidate, his winning in the 95 percent white rural state strongly suggested that Americans had moved beyond stereotype positions on race, and that the country, in effect, was moving away from intense race politics as well. More specifically, the Iowa victory seemed to put to rest concerns that, as a black candidate for president, he couldn’t win because white people wouldn’t vote for him and neither would black people because they thought white people wouldn’t and so they figured they’d be wasting their vote— or, worse, that his success might end in his being assassinated and that would be too much to bear. Those bleak scenarios were suddenly behind us; the Obama campaign unbelievably seeming to have cleared the race hurdle in a single bound.
Obama’s amazing close-second finish in New Hampshire is now somehow turning all of that positive thinking around. Not because he didn’t win but because projection-polling was off: pollsters reported widely that Obama was going to win by a comfortable margin, something like 8 percent, but they got it wrong, and the reason, as reported across the major media outlets, is likely due to race. As Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew research Center, puts it in a New York Times op-ed: poorer, less-educated white folks don’t take polling surveys and, when they do, lie to cover for racist views or leanings or instincts or whatever.
In fact, Hillary won in New Hampshire at least partly because she courted the young working class vote. Obama drew the university crowds and Clinton the blue-collar kids. Clinton will say her victory was not about race but about the economy, that she’s tacking now the way her husband did to win against Bush the First, a victorious wartime president, by focusing convincingly on “the economy, stupid.”
That’s great. Job creation, benefits, a living wage, retraining programs, affordable education, even immigration—these are huge issues on which it would be great to see the two candidates face off on in depth going forward. Less great is that now, however it plays out, whatever they say on these issues will be reported on some level in the press as coded talk for race— as if we needed any further reasons to hate polling.
What happened? How did we get back to square one so quickly?