Bryan Preston, last night at the Tatler: “They’re Going to Blame This on Racism:”
In Kentucky, “uncommitted” kept things interesting in the Democratic primary tonight. Obama won, 57-42. But he was running against air.
The results come on the heels of West Virginia’s Democratic primary earlier this monthwhere a felon incarcerated in Texas took 41 percent of the vote from the president.
In Kentucky, Obama did get more total votes than presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who won the GOP primary with almost 67 percent of the vote.
Obama had more than 118,600 votes to Romney’s approximately 117,100.
“They’ll blame the Arkansas result on racism, too,” Bryan concluded, in an update to his post.”
Headline today at the Washington Post, “Kentucky, Arkansas primaries: Is it racism?”
No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.
They argue that conservative white Democrats — particularly those in the South and Appalachia — don’t want to vote for an African American for president and, therefore, are willing to cast a ballot for almost anyone else up to and including an incarcerated felon. (Keith Judd, we are looking at you.)
The problem with that theory is that it’s almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.
“There’s no easy or simple answer,” said Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners, a Democratic polling firm. “One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.”
What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Appalachia and portions of the South — particularly those states without large African American populations — have long been hostile to President Obama.
Why seems kind of an odd thing to say, as Bryan notes in a See I Told You So post today, linking to a Politico article today with the same JournoList-style leftwing spin on last night’s results:
You Christian wingnuts just can’t stand a black man. We have a troll here who trots that argument out in comments with mind-numbing routine. And they’re right of course, unless you count Allen West, who is a conservative hero. And Clarence Thomas. And Thomas Sowell, and once upon a time, Colin Powell and Alan Keyes etc and etc. Except for them, and J. C. Watts, the former Oklahoma congressman, southerners can’t stand a black man holding office.
At the Wizbang blog, Michael Laprarie describes the WaPo’s headline as a classic example of the “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” style of argument:
Naturally the article brings up the infamous “Bigot Belt” graphic that showed Redneckland to be the only area of the nation that rejected Barack Obama outright in 2008. Certainly it wasn’t Obama’s elitism, or his anti-Americanism, or his sleazy Chicago cronies, or his youthful infatuation with cocaine and Marxist professors, or his long-time association with a radical domestic terrorist, or his membership in a church led by one of the most inflammatory Black separatist pastors in the country. Nah, it couldn’t possibly be any of those things that disinterested voters in the South. It must be because he is half African. Because that’s all we ever think about down here.
You know what? I’m actually kinda proud of that map. Seems we Okies ain’t as dumb as they think we is.
Not surprisingly, Ace has lots of fun with the WaPo story:
A former House member named Tom Cole has an explanation that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Washington Post’s Racism Decision Desk.
“Obama fares poorly in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas because he has nothing in common with them. They are rural, he is urban. They are populist, he is elitist. And in case anyone hadn’t noticed, they are conservative while he is liberal. That isn’t just true of Republicans in these states. It is true of Democrats as well.”
That’s just silly.
On the other hand, Donna Brazie finally strikes on the answer. Or, rather, all three of them.
“Race, resentment [and] fear[.]”
There you go.
So, if those are the reasons, why does this moron then continue…
“Democrats have not had any messaging in those states for more than a decade. It’s hard to get voters to like you or even know you when all they hear is negative stuff.”
Ah. So the Democrats have no messaging there. (It’s always about their messaging, never about their policy and agenda.)
But even that last item isn’t true as Newsbusters notes, deconstructing a CNN contributor’s remarks, apparently built upon the same talking points:
CNN contributor Maria Cardona may have forgotten some history as she tried to spin away President Obama’s troubles in the Arkansas and Kentucky Democratic primaries. Cardona, speaking during the 10 a.m. hour of Wednesday’s Newsroom, argued that “Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party.”
President Obama only picked up 58 percent of the vote in the Kentucky Democratic primary, and 60 percent in Arkansas. “Look, Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party. There’s no real infrastructure there. There’s no organization by the Obama campaign there,” Cardona insisted.
Cardona’s first statement ignores some quite recent history, that former President Bill Clinton was the Democratic governor of Arkansas before he ran for president – and that both Arkansas and Kentucky voted for him in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.
As far as infrastructure goes, both states might be far from solid red as they have had Democratic governors since 2007. Arkansas had two Democratic senators as late as 2011 when former Senator Blanche Lincoln finished out her second term after replacing another Democrat, Senator Dale Bumpers. Meanwhile, Arkansas Democratic Senator Mark Pryor is still serving his second term in the U.S. Senate.
Both states have a Democratic history as well. Since 1950, 11 different Democrats served in Arkansas as governor or acting governor, compared to just three Republican governors. Kentucky has seen 13 Democratic governors since 1950, and only two Republican governors.
Both Kentucky and Arkansas voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Arkansas voted Democratic in every presidential election year from 1920 through 1964. Kentucky, meanwhile, voted Democratic every presidential election from 1932 through 1952, and went for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.
Cardona’s spin is right up there with Obama’s own, when he ludicrously claimed a year ago that “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” That would be news to the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson.
But as always with Obama’s palace guard, it has to be the voters — even if they’re Democrats just like the president and the journalists at the WaPo; the president’s faults are never his own, nor are they ever the fault of his ideology and his oikophobia.
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