For the race, everything. Outside the race, nothing.
You hear this (not the header, above — Ed.) stated quite confidently and quite often. But how true is it? The Washington Post has a new poll out suggesting that 3 in 10 Americans admit to race bias, though it isn’t too clear from the article what this really means.
Michael Barone, the ace US pundit, is unpersuaded.
He proposes a thought experiment. How many people would have been unwilling to vote for Colin Powell in 1995 and are now unwilling to vote for Obama? This is the maximum proportion of the population unwilling to elect a black President full stop.
Barone argues that this proportion is less than 10 per cent. He suggests, say, 6 per cent although this is rather plucking numbers out of the air.
He then suggests that there are other reasons for being unwilling to vote for either – for instance wanting Bill Clinton and John McCain purely as checks on Congress. When you subtract people with these other reasons for the total:
That leaves a vanishingly small percentage of voters unwilling to vote for a black under any circumstances: 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent, maybe 4 percent, tops. **
Now these figures are hardly science, but I think that Michael makes a good point. He also, unfortunately misses a good point, too.
There may be people who would vote for a black Republican or a white Democrat but would not vote for a black Democrat. Racism may not mean they could not vote at all for an African American, but it might mean they pigeonhole African American candidates, fearing them as too left wing.
This wouldn’t have been a problem for Powell, but it is for Obama.
**Outside in the real world this number at least appears to be much higher. –Ed.