"White On White" (Updated)

UPDATE: Seattle neighbor Paul Loeb posts "The Bosnian Sniper Math of Clinton's Popular Vote Claim."

Timothy Egan (NY Times-"Outposts"):

She’s got her white voters. He’s got his. Her whites go to church every week. His whites are more secular. Her whites have dirt under their fingernails. His are more likely to be changing ink cartridges in the office. Her whites like the hard stuff. His whites will choose Oregon pinot.

It makes you want to scream: enough with the hierarchal rankings of white Democratic voters.

But what Tuesday’s stumble-to-the-finish-line vote showed is that this sort of regional race trumpeting is largely meaningless — unless put in the correct context for the general election.

Consider the media shorthand for both Kentucky and West Virginia, where Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by huge margins. These are hard-working, real Americans, the Clinton camp says, and a Democrat can’t win without them.

In fact, both West Virginia and Kentucky have gone against the national tide of the last 8 years and have been trending Republican. Also – and this needs to be said – a significant percentage of the voters in both those states have now indicated that they may not vote for a fellow Democrat simply because he’s black.

Pollsters know that people lie about race; voters rarely come out and say they will not vote for someone because he’s black. Instead, they say things like we’re hearing from West Virginia and Kentucky – that “race is a factor.”

In Kentucky, over 25 percent of Clinton supporters said race was a factor in their vote – about five times the national average for such a question. Clinton, if she really wanted to do something lasting, could ask her supporters why the color of a fellow Democrat’s skin is so important to their vote.

Now, consider the argument that a Democrat needs these states. In 2000, George Bush won West Virginia 52 to 46 percent. Four years later, he’d increased his margin to 56-43.

In Kentucky, Bush won 57-41 in 2000, and padded that to 60-40 four years later.

Appalachia, we now know, is Clinton’s heartland – but it does not resemble the Democratic landscape. If these are Democratic states, there’s some strange serum in the local brew at party headquarters.

On to Oregon, where Obama won by double digits. A bunch of chai tea sipping elitists, with zero body fat, living in hip lofts while working at Nike, yes? No. Well, they do like running, and tea. Oregon is one of the nation’s whitest states – just under 2 percent of residents are black – but rich it is not. The state is below the national average in both per capita income and median household income.

This suggests that Obama doesn’t have a white working class problem so much as a regional problem, in a place where Democrats won’t win anyway.

In Oregon, voters’ surveys show Obama essentially tied Clinton for the blue collar vote while running up a big victory.

And Oregon, unlike West Virginia and Kentucky, may actually be in play for the general election. Al Gore won it by barely 7,000 votes in 2000, a margin that went up to 60,000 votes in 2004. McCain’s advisers say he’s a perfect fit for the state – independent, somewhat maverick.

So, from a purely strategic point of view, the ability to win white blue-collar voters in an open-minded swing state is certainly more important than a solid red state. I would include Pennsylvania in that equation. Just weeks after all the talk of Obama’s problems in the Keystone state, most polls now show him beating McCain in the general election.

What happened in the last few weeks is that Appalachia, in a 24-7 media hothouse, skewed perception. We stared at it far too long, parsing it for meaning beyond its historic range and its hard prejudices.

The Gallup poll this week showed that the rest of the nation is closer to Oregon. Gallup’s daily national tracking poll of Democratic voters found Obama tied Clinton among white voters. He’s tied among people with no college. He’s actually leading – yes, leading! – with women. With the young, he’s leading 3-1. Clinton’s last demographic is women over 50.

So, for Democrats: hello life, goodbye Appalachia.

Howie P.S.: Completely off-topic, Al Giordano sketches a scenario where "the Obama campaign may - a day or two before the May 31 Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting - pull the chair out from under her and call for seating the whole shebang, looking gracious and magnanimous in victory," having previously accumulated enough delegates by then to be the nominee, anyway.