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Arkansas and Obama, a disconnect Sunday, Aug 3, 2008 By John Brummett It's in the fine Arkansas Democratic political tradition of having things both ways. State Democrats say they'll be happy to get behind Barack Obama with all their might, but only if he makes a full commitment to the state that would render their efforts something other than futile and in vain. File that under "B," for "blah, blah, blah," or whatever else you can think of that might start with that particular letter. Arkansas is very nearly the last state Obama would waste time in. These Democrats of such hollow verbiage and strong self-preservation instincts know that. He might venture here before he went to Wyoming or Utah or Oklahoma. And that might be about it. Our state only has six electoral votes. While economically populist, it's culturally conservative, which Obama, by reputation, at least, isn't. It's dominated by - indeed, decided by - white rural voters, who, speaking generally, find Obama's persona and name and background and associations to be alien things they can't identify with and perhaps fear. No doubt there is an element of racism - pockets, I mean - in this white rural demographic. The political demographers can draw a squiggly line from rural Pennsylvania down through West Virginia and over into rural Ohio and down through Kentucky into the Missouri bootheel and down into eastern and southern Arkansas. Along this line, people voted by vast majorities even for Hillary Clinton over Obama in the Democratic primary, one reason surely being that Hillary was the only white option available. Now these white rural voters have an old white guy to vote for. The primary wasn't to pick the president anyway. For some, it merely was the first opportunity to reject the guy with the funny name and the African Muslim daddy. To continue this precarious theme of skin-color politics, and at risk of being compared to Bill Clinton in South Carolina, let me explain why it is that Obama would be more likely to campaign actively even in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina - more Deep South, more typically conservative and more traditionally Republican - than Arkansas. He can expect to get maybe as much as 95 percent of the black vote. He got nearly that against Hillary. He can reasonably hope, by the historically compelling nature of his candidacy, to inspire an uncommonly high turnout among black voters. Arkansas' population is about 15 percent African-American, according to mildly stale census data, while Louisiana's is 32 percent, Mississippi's 36 percent and South Carolina's 30 percent. If Obama starts looking around to confirmed red states where he might have an outside chance of turning the electoral map on its head, he'd probably go to Colorado and New Mexico and Nevada and Virginia first, maybe even Kansas, where the woman Democratic governor, Kathy Sebelius, has been for him all along. But then, it would logically seem, he'd venture to Southern states where he'd start out with a larger base. And it is better to start out with 95 percent of 30 percent than 95 percent of 15 percent. There'd be more moderate white people in Arkansas inclined to embrace Obama, I'd suspect, than in Mississippi, Louisiana or South Carolina. But the number probably wouldn't be enough to equal the playing fields. So to summarize with brutal candor: Obama's biggest political problem nationally is with white rural voters and that only so happens to be the very group that decides races in Arkansas. Mike Beebe, Mark Pryor, Blanche Lincoln, Marion Berry, Mike Ross - it serves them well to say they'll not get involved with Obama unless he puts a premium on their efforts by getting involved with us. They'd like black voters to know of this willingness, you see. Remember that an Arkansas Democrat must appeal at once to rural white voters and black voters. And people wonder why we turn out such dexterous politicians. A postscript: If Obama carries Arkansas, it'll mean there's one seriously massive national landslide for him. Which there could be. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
