WashPo releases a must-read story on the many unreported incidents of racism inflicted on Obama campaign volunteers:

For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.

The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.

If nothing else, the story highlights the fact that the Clintons’ (and the media’s) thoughtless stoking of racial fires in order to further Hillary’s failed candidacy (or gain cheap ratings) has real consequences beyond politics. But before we throw America– particularly the less-educated, white portions of it– off the bridge, blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates makes this insightful observation, in an essay voting and race:

White voters are not all the same. It’s really been enlightening for me to watch Obama’s share of the white vote change state by state. It’s really obliterated this idea that all white people everywhere think the same about blacks. It’s even obliterated the only slightly more nuanced idea that white voters in the South are somehow more racist than white voters in the North. What does it mean that Ohio and Wisconsin whites voted so differently? What do we take from the idea that Obama lost the white vote in Pennsylvania but won it Virginia?

Well, quite a bit as my super-intelligent commenters have pointed out. It seems that it isn’t even a matter of poor whites versus rich whites, or educated whites versus non-educated whites, although all of that factors in. We’ve seen that the percentage of black folks doesn’t really make a difference either. There is something beautiful in this, because you see a complexity in the great monolith that is often simply labeled White America. It’s a complexity that, as a black person, I often miss. Even the one simple fact buried inside is beautiful–the biggest predictor of the white vote seems to be age. The point? The racists aren’t the future. We are.

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www.HillaryClinton.com

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No group was more loyal to them than African-Americans; and in the end, like everyone else, African-Americans realized that the Clintons are frauds, disloyal to the core, cynical to their finger-tips, and finally, finally, returned the favor. … This will be history’s verdict: in the end, the Clintons were defeated not by Republicans, but by African-American Democrats. How wonderful. How poignant. In the end, the karma gets you. Maybe it had to be this way. But this final coup de grace against these awful, hollow, cynical people is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Many Clinton supporters and conservatives continue to downplay the importance of African-American voters by treating their near-unanimous support of Barack Obama as a foregone conclusion. But how quickly they forget that as late as November, it was Hillary Clinton who enjoyed the overwhelming support of the African-American community, leading Barack Obama in this demographic by 25 points. (This is back when Obama wasn’t black enough.) Here’s the lead from one CNN story in October:

Poll: Black support helps Clinton extend lead
Wed October 17, 2007

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Hillary Clinton’s lead over Sen. Barack Obama, her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, is growing among African-American voters who are registered Democrats, and particularly among black women, a poll said Wednesday.

Among black registered Democrats overall, Clinton had a 57 percent to 33 percent lead over Obama.

That’s up from 53 percent for Clinton and 36 percent for Obama in a poll carried out in April.

But sometime in December, as Barack Obama first took a serious lead in lily-white Iowa, the Clintons began launching an inexplicable and increasingly deliberate series of race-baiting attacks in an attempt to turn Obama into “the black candidate”– culminating in the apocalyptic aftermath of South Carolina. It was then that the Clintons decided the black vote was lost to them for good, and that they would make no serious attempt to get it back. Not only that, but they decided that as long as the black vote was out of play, as long as the same black Democrats who saved Bill’s presidency during the impeachment years and affectionately crowned him “the first black president” were now useless to them, then they might as well double down on the race-baiting.

The fact is that by conceding the support of African-Americans– a group that is statistically overrepresented in Democratic primaries– Hillary Clinton lost the nomination in January. It was the equivalent of running a 100-meter dash and giving Barack Obama a 25-meter head start. Had Clinton won even 25% of the black vote throughout the primaries (instead of the 10% she ultimately did), it wouldn’t have been enough to entirely close the elected delegate gap, but it would have gotten her close enough– maybe within 100 elected delegates, 50 if you count Michigan and Florida– to plausibly make her case to superdelegates.

As it stands now, she’s got no case and no claim to the nomination. And black voters did it.

In the long and sometimes ugly history of the United States, rarely has justice for African-Americans come so swiftly and so unanimously. Rarely has democracy been so neat. Black voters around the nation saw a wrong and righted it, they saw the Clintons and their Republican-imitating, racially-divisive, Southern strategy politics, and knocked them cleanly off their pedestal.

With the upcoming nomination of Barack Obama, the first black major party presidential nominee in American history, 2008 will be seen as one of the great moments in black history. What should never be lost in that accomplishment is the near-equally impressive triumph of African-American voters over a would-be political dynasty that did everything it could to trivialize, neutralize, and silence their voice.

UPDATE: The New York Post reports that August 28th, the night Barack Obama will give his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, is the 45th anniversary to the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

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Obama will win North Carolina by 10, Clinton will take Indiana by 5.  African-Americans and the under 40 crowd will vote for Obama, white women and everyone over 90 will vote for Hillary, nothing will change, and we’ll learn nothing we didn’t already know two months ago.

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As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. And … so … it’s all … his fault, that highfalutin Obama! Certain journalistic stars these last few weeks … reacted by parroting the Clinton campaign’s faux-populist talking points about Obama’s condescension toward the yokel class. But pandering to the yokels, pretending to share their tastes and POV? That goes pretty much unchallenged.

If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover ’64, Yale ’68, Harvard ’75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn’t Hillary Clinton (Wellesley ’69, Yale ’73) be talkin’ guns and drinkin’ Crown Royal shots and droppin’ all the g’s from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days? Naked disingenuousness apparently isn’t as off-putting as, say, failing to pin a tiny metal American flag to one’s lapel.

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A new USA Today/Gallup poll out today is disastrous for Obama. He now trails Clinton by seven points and trails her by five on the question of who would be the more electable nominee. A Clinton sweep, and the CW on Obama could absolutely reverse course over night.

But one sentence later:

Meanwhile, the latest New York Times/CBS poll has better numbers for Obama: He has a 12-point lead over Clinton; a strong majority approves of the way in which he handled the Wright controversy; and both he and Clinton sport double-digit leads over McCain in hypothetical general election match-ups.

So basically the moral of the story is that individual polls are meaningless and not worth reporting on– a lesson I learned all too well back in February (though I have no regrets about the amazing post title: “Houston, she has a problem: Obama up 14 in Texas poll“).  National polls are even more meaningless at this point, considering the fact that 90% of the nation has already voted.

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Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the favorite, Big Brown. Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

Is it just me or does Hillary seem to have trouble with predictions?

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If this week has proven nothing else, it’s that distancing himself completely from Jeremiah Wright really should have been the first thing Barack Obama did after he decided to run for president. This is one instance where Hillary Clinton’s instinct (throwing people under the bus the second they become a political liability) would have been better than Barack Obama’s (giving people the benefit of the doubt).

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Don’t see it? Tilt your head 90 degrees to the left.

Still don’t see it?

A spokesman for OGC said: “It is true that it caused a few titters among some staff when viewed on its side, but on consideration we concluded that the effect was generic to the particular combination of the letters OGC - and it is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on Government spend.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Though at least it’s not as bad as the Arlington Pediatric Center logo.

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I think not only a repudiation, but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people.

The phrase “unrepentant terrorist” in reference to Ayers has been repeated ad nauseum by McCain and surrogates since last Sunday’s appearance on This Week with George Smurfanopoulos. Likewise, in the past few weeks, McCain has repeatedly attacked Obama’s now-famous “bitter” comment on small town America as “elitist.”

A number of bloggers have speculated as to why McCain has been hitting Barack Obama so hard on William Ayers and Bitter-gate, yet he hasn’t said a word about Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problem. The conventional wisdom seems to be that McCain is laying off Wright because he has pastor problems of his own. Notably, Pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement was greeted by an open arms press conference by McCain, has claimed that Hurricane Katrina was God’s response to gays in New Orleans and that the Catholic Church is the Antichrist.

But I think the answer to John McCain’s silence on Reverend Wright is much simpler. McCain doesn’t want to be seen within a mile of any line of attack that could be perceived as having racial undertones. It’s why he called for the North Carolina GOP to take down an ad that attacked Obama by airing clips of Wright. That doesn’t mean McCain won’t happily sit back and benefit from whatever racial attacks are levied by 527s and conservative talk radio (notice how despite McCain’s “efforts,” the North Carolina ad will air anyway). It just means that McCain– unlike Hillary Clinton– is not willing to completely destroy his own legacy or concede 90% of the African-American vote to Barack Obama by personally poking that hornet’s nest.

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Their latest tactic is to convince people who don’t know what they’re talking about that the race should be decided not on delegates, but on the popular vote.  And Pennsylvania primary votes were still being counted Tuesday night when Clinton and her surrogates began making this argument:

After last night’s decisive victory in Pennsylvania, more people have voted for Hillary than any other candidate, including Sen. Obama. Estimates vary slightly, but according to Real Clear Politics, Hillary has received 15,095,663 votes to Sen. Obama’s 14,973,720, a margin of more than 120,000 votes. ABC News reported this morning that ‘Clinton has pulled ahead of Obama’ in the popular vote. This count includes certified vote totals in Florida and Michigan.

To people who know what they’re talking about and who have been paying attention to the race, this is literally one of the stupidest things ever written.  Even ABC News slammed the Clinton campaign for misrepresenting what their report actually said.  But to people who don’t know what they’re talking about, this popular vote argument makes a lot of sense.  It could resonate especially with Democrats who feel that this situation echoes the 2000 presidential race, where Al Gore won the popular vote but was denied the presidency.  In each case, the Clinton campaign would argue, arcane electoral rules and regulations overruled the popular will of the people.

This argument is such nonsense that it won’t convince more than a handful of superdelegates that Hillary Clinton has any rightful claim to the Democratic nomination, and any superdels who are convinced by this line of reasoning should be promptly stripped of their duties, if not their high school diplomas.  But the problems this argument could cause Barack Obama in the general election– where a large number of former Clinton supporters, especially women, could be convinced that she has been denied what is rightfully hers– cannot be understated.

The longer Clinton and her surrogates are allowed to peddle this popular vote myth among the masses unchallenged and unchecked by facts– while Obama and his surrogates waste time talking about the now moot points of delegates and math– the more difficult it will be for Obama to win Clinton’s quickly hardening (that’s what she said) constituency in the fall.

The argument against the popular vote myth is a simple one to make, and there are two main points that should be hammered home repeatedly:

1. The 2008 Democratic race is and always has been a race for delegates, never for popular vote.  If the race were in any way ever about popular vote, no one would campaign in Iowa or New Hampshire.  And as I recall hearing from one Obama surrogate last week, if popular vote mattered in the least, Obama would have spent the two weeks prior to Super Tuesday camped out in California (population: 36 million) or Illinois (pop. 12 million), running up the score in those highly populous states.  He certainly wouldn’t have spent time campaigning in Idaho (pop. 1.4 million) or Delaware (pop. 850,000), and neither would Clinton.  Wyoming (pop. 500,000) would not have been the battleground state it was, with both campaigns criss-crossing the state for a week to win votes (read: delegates).

So the point here is simple: If popular vote was really a legitimate measure of the Democratic race, why did Bill and Hillary Clinton spend the same amount of time (about a week) campaigning in Wyoming as they did in California– a state with 70 times more popular vote?  Conversely, does it even make sense that California should count 70 times more than Wyoming?

2. Hillary Clinton’s current claim to the popular vote lead assumes that the vote tally in Michigan is legitimate.  This is a state where neither Barack Obama nor John Edwards’ names were on the ballot, due to an early-state pledge that all the candidates– including Clinton– made while campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire (Clinton left her name on Michigan’s ballot but insisted it was just for show).  This is a state where Dennis Kucinich came in second.  This is a state where Hillary Clinton herself made this crystal clear statement last winter:

It’s clear. This election they’re having is not going to count for anything.

But most dubious of all, Clinton’s claim to the popular vote in Michigan assumes that the following vote tally is absolutely, straight-faced legitimate:

Clinton: 328,151, Obama: 0.

The point here: Does the Clinton campaign– or anyone– really believe that Barack Obama would have received zero votes in Michigan had that state followed the rules? (The case against Florida is just as strong, but probably too complex to sell to the masses).

Lastly, here’s the simplest and best way for the Obama campaign to put a stop to all of Hillary Clinton’s claims to the popular vote lead: Take it from her in every possible measure.  Run up the score.  Stop going after delegates.  That race is over.  You won.  A lead of 150 delegates is exactly the same as a lead of 140 delegates.

So for the next two weeks in North Carolina and Indiana, forget about picking up those one or two extra delegates in blue-collar districts that are demographically tailored to Clinton’s strengths.  Let her have the delegates.  Campaign non-stop in African-American, affluent white, college, and rural communities, and focus on nothing but turning out as large a vote as possible in those areas.

If you win the popular vote in those states, you take away Clinton’s last halfway-marketable claim to the nomination.  Even if she convinces the entire Democratic Party that the popular vote is the most important measure of the race and that the results in Michigan and Florida should count double, it won’t matter if she’s behind even then.

The argument the Obama campaign has been making since February 5– that the leader in pledged delegates should be the nominee– is the right one, and makes for an ironclad case to the superdelegates in August.  But if the Obama campaign tries to make the same semi-complex argument to the masses– people who don’t know what they’re talking about– as they do to the superdels, the race very well could go until August.  Popular vote may be one of the least legitimate measures of the race, but because it involves the simple art of counting, it will resonate with a lot of people– especially Clinton supporters who want desperately to believe that their candidate is still in it somehow.

If the Obama campaign lets this ridiculous popular vote argument fester much longer, then not only will Obama be– by Hillary Clinton’s carictures of him– too inexperienced, too black, not black enough, both too hawkish and too dovish on foreign policy, and maybe but we can’t know for sure too Muslim, but he’ll also be a thief– just one more man who took what rightfully belonged to a woman.  And no doubt, he’ll have a lot of very scorned, very vindictive former Clinton supporters to deal with in November.

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Those who fail to learn from history will be doomed to four more years in Iraq:

“Every day they run a primary campaign, we run a general election campaign,” explained Mark McKinnon, McCain’s senior media adviser, as the campaign bus rolled through Kentucky. “And every day we run a general election campaign is a good day for us.” That was not all. McKinnon, who used to work for George W. Bush, said he saw an historical analogy. The spring of 2008, he claimed, was shaping up to be as fruitful for Republicans as past cycles.

“In the Bush campaign we used to say that we won the campaign in 2000 and 2004 between March and June,” McKinnon said later in the day. “And I think the way things are going we could say that McCain won this election between March and June.”

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