More than one third latched on the adjective “complaining” and 24 percent said blacks were “violent.”
An AP-Yahoo News poll has found one-third of whiteDemocrats harbor negative views toward blacks – many calling them”lazy,” “violent” or responsible for their own troubles.
Thepoll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentageof voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easilybe larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 -about two and one-half percentage points.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He’s an allyof an unpopular president and would be the nation’s oldest first-termpresident. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans holdat least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes manyDemocrats and independents.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He’s an allyof an unpopular president and would be the nation’s oldest first-termpresident. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans holdat least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes manyDemocrats and independents.
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents – votersObama can’t win the White House without – agreed with at least onenegative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they aresignificantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t havesuch views.
Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the historybooks. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at thepresidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversaryof Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a seminal momentfor a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.
“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but thatdoesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford politicalscientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.