Women are not going to vote for Hillary because they are not rational; they make decisions on impulse. Blacks are not necessarily going to vote for Obama since he's not really African American -- not in the way we have come to understand it anyway. Clinton and Obama are in a death struggle for the black vote; they are going to neutralize each other and leave an opening for the lurking John Edwards to slip through... Blah, blah, blah.
Enjoy the silly season, this time of unbridled speculation and meaningless conjecture; a time when knowing something about something is hardly a prerequisite for being absolutely certain of it.
Now that the winners and losers of the 2006 campaign have settled into the more difficult task of actually trying to govern the country, the rhetoric surrounding the 2008 campaign for president has taken on an urgency that belies the fact that the first votes won't be cast for another year and that the election itself is more than 18 months away. (That's two Labor Days, two July 4ths, two Memorial Days.)
Such urgency also belies the reality that every possible factor which might determine the outcome of the presidential election could change radically -- and maybe more than once -- between now and the time when it does matter. The only things we know for sure are: 1.) George W. Bush is not going to be president when we wake up on that third Wednesday in January 2009, and 2.) there are a lot of people who want to replace him. Beyond that, all the tumult and racket is just tumult and racket.
That, of course, will stop no one with a keyboard or a microphone from going on at length about the crucial importance of what they know and think at this very moment. And not all of this is coming from some lunatic fringe or the outer reaches of the blogosphere. Obama's problem with the ambivalence of black voters was detailed first on the front page of The New York Times. Hillary's woman problem was revealed on the op-ed page of The Washington Post.
The Times's Obama story, under the headline, "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted," authoritatively posed the question: "So why are some black voters so uneasy about Senator Barack Obama?" The story went on to cite varied, if not numerous, voices of black unease about the Obama campaign to illustrate the distance between the Illinois senator and what would presumably be a natural constituency for him. It quoted the black writer Stanley Crouch saying: "When black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about."
It's OK to laugh. I do not know what Stanley is talking about, but I'm sure it does not matter.
African Americans, more than most people, understand the cosmic damage that can be done when people are judged simply by the color of their skin. So having spent a few centuries insisting that the criteria for judgment be set higher than race and skin color, they are the last people to say they will vote for someone just because he is black. You can be sure, however, that to the extent that Obama positions himself as a serious contender for the nomination, no one will appreciate, or embrace, the historic nature of that candidacy more than African Americans. You can count on that. If Obama turns out to be serious, African Americans will take him seriously. But chit-chatting about it now, before there is much real to discuss, produces aimless chatter about whether he is "black enough" or whatever other idle speculation we care to offer up.
Indeed, with the election so far off and so many people running, we remain in danger of slipping into ever-deeper levels of ridiculousness. Feminist Linda Hirshman, writing in the Post discounted the idea that women will rally around Hillary Clinton in sufficient numbers to win her the presidency: "If Clinton is going to attract the women she needs, she's going to have to do something more that simply have a pair of X chromosomes herself." Who can argue? Alas, Hirshman then proceeds to make this argument: "[W]omen don't decide elections because they're not rational political actors -- they don't make firm policy commitments and back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality."
We could all agree that no one demographic group decides elections by themselves, but I have to admit I was intrigued to hear about this new voting bloc in American politics -- "the rational political actors." Round them up! Find out what they're drinking!
Here's the bottom line: Both Clinton and Obama have threshold questions to answer about their candidacies that have nothing whatever to do with their race and gender. The process by which they try to answer those questions will bear heavy scrutiny -- and will of course play out in the national headlines with special intensity, since they look different from the last 43 American presidents. But if and when those questions are answered, voters who see a chance to have -- for the first time -- the president look like them or share their chromosomes, are going to flock to the candidate in droves. The good news for Democrats is that they could come out of the primary season with the entire base of the party electrified. And that has been shown to decide an election or two.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
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