Primary colors and lessons

Oye como va. The bodies of four children were found Wednesday in a home in Southeast D.C. A father on Tuesday tossed his four children off a bridge in Gulf Coastal Alabama.

“Were they black?” someone asked.

“Does it matter?” I retorted.

Does it matter that Barack Obama, who garnered substantial voter support in two predominately white states, is biracial but the media call him black? Amid the historic haze of 2008 presidential politics, the race to breakdown race is no fairytale, as Bill Clinton described it the other day when Hillary missed her cue to cry.

Before Barack won Iowa, Hillary, the pollsters and pundits said, was poised for victory in New Hampshire. After Barack won Iowa, they flopped. Before the clock struck midnight on Wednesday, the voices in the spin zone were turning on themselves, trying to figure out how they got it wrong when they were right all along. (Hillary vs. Rudy — heh, heh.)

What the pundits didn’t factor in is 1) people lie before they vote and people lie after they vote, and 2) when New Hampshirites say they are independent, they mean they are independent. (How about a tall glass of Kool-Aid with that Huckaburger?)

More importantly, nobody factored in the cultural aspects of this run for the White House. We haven’t seen these most influential dynamic things in presidential elections. The woman thing and the African American thing. The Hispanic thing. The Mormon, Southern Baptist, Catholic Evangelical and nondenominational things. And the Muslim thing? Well, we’ll see which way those voters swing in states like Michigan, New York, Illinois, New Jersey and Utah.

It’s a generational thing, too, with the candidates and pollsters pondering whether Madison Avenue’s favorite demographic (the 18- to 34-year-olds) will stand with their parents or Barack the vote.

Don’t forget the geopolitical factor. While the candidates talk about being contenders in all 50 states, my city, which is true blue, doesn’t even merit a mention. But that doesn’t mean it’s not represented. Guess where my Democratic mayor, Adrian Fenty, was on Tuesday night, the night of the New Hampshire primaries? He wasn’t in City Hall, poring over policy reports and proposals about mundane municipal issues. No. Adrian was in Manchester, embracing Barack before he took the podium.

I don’t begrudge my man; after all, Adrian and Barack reflect one of the very tenets Martin Luther King Jr. raised in his remarkable “I Have a Dream” speech. Didn’t King say that race shouldn’t matter? That we should judge people — if we must judge people — “by the content of their character” not the color of their skin? King spoke those words just a couple of weeks before four little girls were murdered in a 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., and decades before four siblings were murdered in D.C. and before, in the dead of night, a father tossed his four children off a bridge.

King’s dream, whether you believed in it or not, is partially realized in Adrian and Barack because they are successful politicians who happen to be biracial. But politics and the fierce win-at-all-costs strategies demand racial imagery. And the messages are often devious.

Revisit the 1988 presidential race and the Willie Horton campaign ads. Horton, a felon who had already murdered one human being, was released on a weekend pass in Massachusetts and while furloughed committed a rape and an atrocious attack in Maryland. Should the race of his victims have mattered? No. And it didn’t at his sentencing. Should Horton’s own race have mattered in the campaign ads?

A similar gambit occurred in the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee. The move at that time had a blond woman asking Harold Ford to call her (wink, wink). The goal was to push the white Republican candidate ahead of the black candidate (Mr. Ford) and into victory lane. We know who won that race.

Those two ads were of the Republican braintrust, but don’t for a minute think that Democratic strategists and politicians won’t re-read the playbook and thrown down the race card. At some point before Super Tuesday, Hillary has to — forgive me this one time — “change” her message to voters from “You owe me” to the message of Barack and John McCain, which is, in effect, a message that says, “You owe it to yourselves.”

The early primary colors of 2008 aren’t at all what many American voters expected. The candidates (and their spouses) are flipping all over themselves on their own records, and the endless string of forums and debates and the countless polls (though a sincere tip of my locks goes to Rasmussen and Frank Luntz is in order) haven’t helped distinguish a frontrunner. Even the Hispanic messenger, Bill Richardson, was silenced.

Story Continues →