posted September 15, 2008 01:14 AM            

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It’s taken for granted these days that Barack Obama, the all-but-presumptive-if-only-she’d-go-away Democratic nominee, has a problem with white working-class voters. On the morning after the Pennsylvania primary (let’s not even get into West Virginia), he said, “We have won the white blue-collar vote in a whole bunch of states.” But as Ronald Brownstein explained in National Journal, “That’s not true, no matter how the white blue-collar vote is defined.”

In an article in The New Republic titled “The Big Race: Obama and the Psychology of the Color Barrier,” John B. Judis carefully examined racial bias among white voters. How best to counteract it? By changing the subject from race, Judis said, to the war and the economy. I suspect the Obama campaign has already thought of that.

Since racism in America often comes down to money (get away from my job) or sex (get away from my daughter), maybe the Democrats should make better use of a passage in Obama’s exceptional memoir, “Dreams From My Father” - “the single most vetted book in American politics right now,” as one publisher was quoted saying in a front-page article by Janny Scott in yesterday’s Times, and (at least in my estimation) a far better book than “The Audacity of Hope.”

First, here is Obama writing about his mother and father:

quote:

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Miscegenation. The word is humpbacked, ugly, portending a monstrous outcome: like antebellum or octoroon, it evokes images of another era, a distant world of horsewhips and flames. … In 1960, the year that my parents were married, miscegenation still described a felony in over half the states in the Union. In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way.

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quote:

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“The parents were there, and they were very nice, very gracious. … The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known - presidents, diplomats, industrialists. There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.”

“So what happened?”

I shrugged. “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world.”

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So Barack Obama, as Maureen Dowd has written, broke up with his girlfriend “partly” because she was white. That doesn’t sound very post-racial, and in this one respect he seems rather less audacious than his parents. But will it play in Peoria? It already has.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/barack-obama-and-the-post-racial-campaig n/