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The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 17 February 2008
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.
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