Third of Electoral College Majority Might Say No
The Democratic Party's cadre of superdelegates may be the best instrument it has if it wants to win the presidential election this fall. Those delegates would be well-advised to hang on to their convention vote instead of jumping on an Obama bandwagon now or paying off old debts to the Clintons.
Few pundits we know of are talking about it, and we'd prefer not to either, but the Democrats could be handing the election to Republicans if it nominates Sen. Barack Obama as its nominee. This reality makes a great case for the superdelegates to take control of the party and over- rule a highly flawed primary system if it chooses Obama as the nominee.
The United States has come a long way in giving women and blacks something approaching equality with the ruling white males, but anyone with a realistic bone in his or her body has to acknowledge sex- ism and racism are still present in our society.
Women, and thus Hillary Clinton as president, may be able to surmount the prejudice against a woman in the White House by their sheer numbers--a slight majority of the U.S. population, a large majority of the voters.
But can blacks and a man of their race win a national election today?
Remember that map of the United States with states colored blue if they voted Democratic and red if they voted Republican? In 1964, the southern states would have been painted a solid blue (except Arizona, home state of the GOP candidate). Now the same states are quadrenni- ally painted a solid red. What happened? Racism.
That's right. More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act that sin- glehandedly changed the South from a swatch of blue to one of red, ra- cism still abounds in the country. Racists and people with biases in that direction tend to vote Republican. And southern states vote Republican these days. All of the southern states voted for George W. Bush in the extremely tight 2000 election and have done so since the Democratic party and President Lyndon Johnson, an ironic Democratic son of the South, engineered the rights act.
Yes, Obama won six primaries in southern states--Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. But those were Democrats voting, giving a large number of delegates, enough to give him the edge over Clinton and thus the nomination.
Twelve states considered southern or that usually vote with south- ern states next door, plus Utah, have 171 electoral college votes. That number is just two-thirds of the 270 total needed to elected a president. In a close race in the fall, automatically losing a third of the majority of electoral votes could be disastrous for the Democrats.
Yes, many Republican women strangely retain a hatred for Clin- ton, but since there are far more women voters than men voters in the United States, that hatred is not likely to be able to swing a sexist bias to an entire state.
Superdelegates who consider signing on to an Obama band- wagon six months before the convention should have second thoughts. Give Obama eight more years of experience, which he sorely needs, ei- ther as a senator or vice president, and the possibility of a black presi- dent may be easier for those American racists still with us in 2016 to swallow. Let us try to break down one barrier at a time.
(Utah is important in the calculation because while several south- ern states split away from red to vote for Jimmy Carter of Georgia and/or for Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Utah has been consistently red. The state is overwhelmingly Mormon, a religion that discriminated officially against blacks until 1978. Many members subscribe to the founders' strange idea that brother-killer Cain was black, even though, according to the same Bible that discusses the slaying, only two other people existed on Earth when Cain was born--Adam and Eve.
Obama has become the Camelot candidate for the Democrats, ginning up an excitement that harkens back to the presidency of Jack Kennedy. That may be a good feeling and something to hope for, but Democrats may be better off deferring that hope for a few more years.
