The
Grand Old White Party Confronts
Obama
By
Frank Rich
The
curse continues. Regardless of
party, it’s hara-kiri for a
politician to step into the shadow
of even a mediocre speech by Barack
Obama.
Senator Obama’s televised victory
oration celebrating his Chesapeake
primary trifecta on Tuesday night
was a mechanical rehash. No matter.
When the networks cut from the
17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a
Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s
victory tableau before a few hundred
spectators in the Old Town district
of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun
of what happened to Hillary Clinton
the night she lost Iowa. Senator
McCain, backed by a collection of
sallow-faced old Beltway pols,
played the past to Mr. Obama’s here
and now. Mr. McCain looked like a
loser even though he, unlike Senator
Clinton, had actually won.
But he
has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton.
What distinguished his posse from
Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its
age but its demographic monotony:
all white and nearly all male. Such
has been the inescapable Republican
brand throughout this campaign, ever
since David Letterman memorably
pegged its lineup of presidential
contenders last spring as “guys
waiting to tee off at a restricted
country club.”
For
Mr. McCain, this albatross may be
harder to shake than George W. Bush
and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff
with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain
jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I
am fired up and ready to go” in his
speech Tuesday night, it was as
cringe-inducing as the white covers
of R & B songs in the 1950s — or
Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with
his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther
King’s birthday. Trapped in an
archaic black-and-white newsreel,
the G.O.P. looks more like a
nostalgic relic than a national
political party in contemporary
America. A cultural sea change has
passed it by.
The
2008 primary campaign has been so
fast and furious that we haven’t
paused to register just how
spectacular that change is. All the
fretful debate about whether voters
would turn out for a candidate who
is a black or a woman seems a
century ago. Mrs. Clinton and Mr.
Obama vanquished the Democratic
field, including a
presidential-looking Southern white
man with an enthusiastic following,
John Edwards. What was only months
ago an exotic political experiment
is now almost ho-hum.
Given
that the American story has been so
inextricable from the struggle over
race, the Obama triumph has been the
bigger surprise to many. Perhaps
because I came of age in the
racially divided Washington public
schools of the 1960s and had one of
my first newspaper jobs in Richmond
in the early 1970s, I almost had to
pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52
percent of Virginia’s white vote
last week. The Old Dominion
continues to astonish those who
remember it when.
Here’s
one of my memories. In 1970, Linwood
Holton, the state’s first Republican
governor since Reconstruction and a
Richard Nixon supporter, responded
to court-ordered busing by
voluntarily placing his own children
in largely black Richmond public
schools. For this symbolic gesture,
he was marginalized by his own
party, which was hellbent on
pursuing the emergent Strom
Thurmond-patented Southern strategy
of exploiting white racism for
political gain. After Mr. Holton,
Virginia restored to office the
previous governor, Mills Godwin, a
champion of the state’s “massive
resistance” to desegregation.
Today
Anne Holton, the young daughter sent
by her father to a black school in
Richmond, is the first lady of
Virginia, the wife of the Democratic
governor, Tim Kaine. Mr. Kaine’s
early endorsement of Mr. Obama was a
potent factor in his remarkable
28-point landslide on Tuesday.
For
all the changes in Virginia and
elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern
strategy persist in some Republican
quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has
been a victim, rather than a
practitioner, of the old racial
gamesmanship. In his brutal 2000
South Carolina primary battle
against Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr.
McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi
daughter was the target of a smear
campaign. He was also pilloried for
accurately describing the
Confederate flag as a “symbol of
racism and slavery.” (Sadly, he
started to bend this straight talk
the very next day.) He is still
paying for correctly describing
Jerry Falwell, once an ardent
segregationist, and Pat Robertson, a
longtime defender of South African
apartheid, as “agents of
intolerance.” And of course Mr.
McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to
some in his party for resisting
nativist overkill on illegal
immigration.
Though
Mr. Bush ran for president on
“compassionate conservatism,” he
diversified only his party’s window
dressing: a 2000 Republican National
Convention that had more
African-Americans onstage than on
the floor and the incessant
photo-ops with black schoolchildren
to sell No Child Left Behind. There
are no black Republicans in the
House or the Senate to stand with
the party’s 2008 nominee. Exit polls
tell us that African-Americans
voting in this year’s G.O.P.
primaries account for at most 2 to 4
percent of its electorate even in
states with large black populations.
Mr.
Obama’s ascension hardly means that
racism is kaput in America, or that
the country is “postracial” or
“transcending race.” But it’s
impossible to deny that another
barrier has been surmounted. Bill
Clinton’s attempt to minimize Mr.
Obama as a niche candidate in South
Carolina by comparing him to Jesse
Jackson looks more ludicrous by the
day. Even when winning five Southern
states (Virginia included) on Super
Tuesday in 1988, Mr. Jackson
received only 7 to 10 percent of
white votes, depending on the exit
poll.
Whatever the potency of his
political skills and message, Mr.
Obama is also riding a demographic
wave. The authors of the new book
“Millennial Makeover,” Morley
Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point
out that the so-called millennial
generation (dating from 1982) is the
largest in American history, boomers
included, and that roughly 40
percent of it is African-American,
Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One
in five millennials has an immigrant
parent. It’s this generation that is
fueling the excitement and some of
the record turnout of the Democratic
primary campaign, and not just for
Mr. Obama.
Even
by the low standards of his party,
Mr. McCain has underperformed at
reaching millennials in the thriving
culture where they live. His
campaign’s effort to create a
MySpace-like Web site flopped. His
most-viewed appearances on YouTube
are not viral videos extolling him
or replaying his best speeches but
are instead sendups of his most
reckless foreign-policy
improvisations — his threat to stay
in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey
warning (sung to the tune of the
Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara
Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the
vast arena of the Internet he has
been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy,
the G.O.P. brand incarnate.
The
theory of the McCain candidacy is
that his “maverick” image will bring
independents (approaching a third of
all voters) to the rescue. But a New
York Times-CBS News poll last month
found that independents have even a
lower opinion of Mr. Bush, the war,
the surge and the economy than the
total electorate and skew slightly
younger. Though the independents in
this survey went 44 percent to 32
percent for Mr. Bush over John Kerry
in 2004, they now prefer a
Democratic presidential candidate
over a Republican by 44 percent to
27 percent.
Mr.
McCain could get lucky, especially
if Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic
nomination and unites the G.O.P.,
and definitely if she tosses her
party into civil war by grabbing
ghost delegates from Michigan and
Florida. But those odds are
dwindling. More likely, the
Republican Party will face Mr. Obama
with a candidate who reeks even more
of the past and less of change than
Mrs. Clinton does. I was startled to
hear last week from a friend in
California, a staunch anti-Clinton
Republican businessman, that he was
wavering. Though he regards Mr.
McCain as a hero, he wrote me: “I am
tired of fighting the Vietnam war. I
have drifted toward Obama.”
Similarly, Mark McKinnon, the Bush
media maven who has played a
comparable role for Mr. McCain in
this campaign, reaffirmed to Evan
Smith of Texas Monthly weeks ago
that he would not work for his own
candidate in a race with Mr. Obama.
Elaborating to NPR last week, Mr.
McKinnon said that while he is “100
percent” for Mr. McCain and
disagrees with Mr. Obama “on very
fundamental issues,” he likes Mr.
Obama and what he’s doing for the
country enough to stay on the
sidelines rather than fire off
attack ads.
As
some Republicans drift away in a
McCain-Obama race, who fills the
vacuum? Among the white guys
flanking Mr. McCain at his victory
celebration on Tuesday, revealingly
enough, was the once-golden George
Allen, the Virginia Republican who
lost his Senate seat and
presidential hopes in 2006 after
being caught on YouTube calling a
young Indian-American Democratic
campaign worker “macaca.”
In
that incident, Mr. Allen added
insult to injury by also telling the
young man, “Welcome to America and
the real world of Virginia.” As
election results confirmed both in
2006 and last week, it is Mr. Allen
who is the foreigner in 21st century
America, Mr. Allen who is in the
minority in the real world of
Virginia. A national rout in 2008
just may be that Republican Party’s
last stand.
