Just a little over an hour ago shocking news came out of the New Hampshire primaries. Against all odds, Senator Clinton narrowly beat Senator Obama. Against the odds if you believed the pundits and the polls. As late as this morning, all the polls showed Senator Obama was comfortably ahead, some by double digits. But polls are not always right, for voters lie. The establishment media which as late as today was busy writing Senator Clinton off and advising her to retool her campaign, or even save the Clinton brand by pulling out, will express shock at Senator Barack Obama’s loss, and hail Senator Clinton’s victory; they will call her the ‘Come Back Kid’, harking back to President Bill Clinton’s own victory in New Hampshire that resuscitated his campaign in 1992. The Clinton electoral machine will now be seen as an unbeatable juggernaut.
Commentators will vie for explanations as the noisy and gleeful pundits are already doing as I write on all the major television news broadcasts. Many will attribute it to a sudden change of mind by voters, especially women voters, who decided to back a woman who was roundly vilified and ridiculed in the media. Some will even say the tide turned when Senator Clinton choked with tears and showed emotion. Forget all the chatter about policy and electability. Emotion finally connected her to voters, showed the real Mrs. Hillary Clinton. Others will credit President Clinton’s harsh attacks on Senator Obama’s candidacy as a fairy tale, his legendary reputation as the best politician of his aging Baby Boomer generation. We may even hear of flaws in the Obama campaign, that voters don’t like to be taken for granted, that they like to pull down the front runner a peg or two.
Gripped by instant amnesia the pundits will indeed have a field day, forgetting what they have been saying all along and start peddling new predictions; newspapers will find a new narrative, relishing the duel between Senators Obama and Clinton, between hope and experience, between the poetry and prose of the two candidates' campaigns, the past and the future, change and continuity, between the dreams of political insurgency and the impulses of a presidential dynasty that has characterized American politics more than most people care to admit. But few will talk about how the voters lied to the pollsters, how the media built up Senator Obama only to see him fall short, thereby creating a heroic narrative of Senator Clinton’s electoral recovery.
The voters lied. They lied to the pollsters, and the pundits who invoked the polls as magic chants lied to the public and the world. But they only lied when it came to the Democratic race; they got it right for the Republican race where they correctly predicted Senator John McCain's margin of victory. The voters lied for the Democractic race because at the heart of the contest between Senators Clinton and Obama is race, not the seductions of rhetoric or personality. Race is the invisible elephant in the room, whose name dare not be called. America’s story is rooted in the entrenched and unrequited “tribal” pathology of race and racism. Senator Obama’s attractiveness has been in his apparent post-racial persona (read post civil rights), which he himself has been anxious to play to by minimizing the presence of blacks around him. But America is not post-racial. It is in the era of color blind racism, in which the general public feigns blindness or indifference to race when in reality everything around them is structured and mediated by the imperatives of race. And so where black candidates are concerned they often tell pollsters one thing, and in the voting booth they will vote their racial conscience.
This is what happened in New Hampshire. Senator Obama’s race finally caught up with him; he fell to the predictable assault of the 'Bradley effect' that always seems to rear its racist head in black-white electoral contests. In the public caucuses of Iowa race could be muted, in the private primary voting booths of New Hampshire it could safely come out. In this case, Senator Obama was trumped by the intimate intersections of race and gender. In the end, the majority of white women simply could not bring themselves to vote for a black man over their sister, who holds the historic promise of becoming the first among them to finally rise to the presidency, to break the highest gender ceiling in the land. This is what in American politics is called racial block voting and descriptive representation, siding with your own. To be sure, Senator Obama won many white votes, for after all New Hampshire is a predominantly white state, but if the polls had been correct he would have won. Obviously they were not. Many white voters lied.
They lied to themselves but not to African Americans whose historical memories are deeply etched with the traumas and tentacles of racism. The New Hampshire vote will not come as a surprise to most of them, some of who have in fact been holding back their support for Senator Obama not because he is not black enough as the silly media discourse has it but because they assessed that his chances of becoming president were low. America remains a deeply racialized, not to say racist country. The time for a black candidate to win the highest office in this vast and powerful country is yet to come. The promise of America remains unfulfilled for the African diaspora.
What the Obama-Clinton duel might do is further fracture the Democratic coalition between the African American community and certain segments of the white democratic base. And that might result in another republican taking over the White House from President Bush. Only time will tell. The pundits must be salivating.
It's been called the Bradley effect (That's: Tom Bradley)
Very interesting thoughts, with which I largely agree.
Indeed, one thing that was disconcerting to me was how race became so suddenly noxious in the air of the punditry after Obama’s Iowa win. Whereas commentary largely avoided discussion of Obama’s race pre-Iowa, after he won everything suddenly became a credit to America’s supposedly “enlightened” position vis race. . . . It makes me wonder if the fact that so much of the talk about Obama’s race filling the air in the past days, in effect, fostered some of the backsliding. A lot can happen behind the curtain, versus a caucus like in Iowa, where you can’t say one thing publicly and go another way in the moment.
The only place I would differ from your interesting analysis is your naming the disparity between entrance polls and actual results as due to an act of voters “lying” (in the strict sense of that act). . . . Instead of calling this disjunction a “lie”—which assigns intent to mislead—it might be more productive to wonder what sort of unconscious forces had sway and affect here. And I’m using “unconscious” where with specific mind to that sense of the word that marks those things that we respond to while keeping them invisible. In this sort of frame, rather than saying voters intentionally deceived pollsters, we could say that the disparity between the voters’ publicly signaled intention and the actual act in the voting both might be due largely to an influencing factor (race) that they (or I should say: we) are not ready/willing/able to face. Moreover, in that sort of analysis, this sort of lingering screen of race could be only compounded in the wake of the gushing reviews from the pundits proclaiming, as you note, that America is supposedly post-race.
Great post, though. And I think you’re exactly right that the majority of the analysis we’re going to see in the coming days will be asking, “What happened in the last day(s) after those polls showed Obama was up?” Which is, as you note, the wrong question to be asking.