Thursday, April 10, 2008

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth


Published March 18, 2008, on lipmagazine.com

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.
But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?
Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that n o body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America . I don't care what the facts are."
And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemn s nation states for thei r actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America . If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.

So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standi ng and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth.

No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would beco me Jamestown . To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church , because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the even ts were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.
Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so div orced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, v iciously bigoted white p eople, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.
No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.
So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.
Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Arizona blacks: Where's McCain?


Oscar Tillman heads the Phoenix area branch of the NAACP and is a former statewide president of the group. He has been a leader of Arizona’s small, tight-knit African-American community for decades.


So it comes as something of a surprise to learn the name of one person, over all those years, with whom he has never spoken. It is the state’s senior senator better known these days as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

John McCain, said Tillman, “has pretty well zero relationship with the African-American community that I know of.”

“I don’t recall him ever attending any function with the NAACP,” Tillman added. “Each year we send them an invitation [to an annual banquet], and each year they say no.”

Interviews with black civic and business leaders in Arizona found no one who suggested that McCain holds racial animus. And McCain can point to some warm personal and political associations with blacks, some of whom cited his responsiveness to their concerns when they approached him on official business.

But the widespread perception of activists in the state’s traditional civil rights organizations and the African-American press is that McCain has consistently treated them with indifference.

He had few if any important relationships with these usually Democratic-leaning institutional pillars. The main reason, say leaders of these groups, was that McCain never demonstrated much interest in building them.

“In a word, none,” said Ron Busby, president of the Greater Phoenix Black Chamber of Commerce, when asked to describe the senator’s relationship with Arizona’s African-American community.

In the 10 years that the organization, which represents about 300 black-owned businesses, has been in existence, Busby said McCain has never been to any of its events.

Busy, who owns a large janitorial services firm that cleans businesses, hospitals and the home of the Arizona Cardinals, said his organization is not a traditionally liberal black group.

To the contrary, it would seem tailor-made for the kind of appeals that many Republicans say the party should be making to break the Democratic Party’s historic lock on the black vote the very type of line-crossing politics at which McCain has excelled in other contexts.

“We have African-Americans that are typically affluent, have moved here from other portions of the country, and have our views that are more conservative, at least from a national perspective,” Busby said.
The choice McCain faced in Arizona is familiar to Republican politicians in many states: how much effort to invest in political base-touching with constituencies that they know will vote strongly Democratic under any scenario?

In Arizona, civil rights activists say they get a far more responsive hearing from the state’s junior senator, Republican Jon Kyl.

“I deal with Sen. Kyl’s office,” said Tillman. “Sen. Kyl will get on the phone and call you.”

But some Arizona blacks tell a different story, saying McCain has been talking to and helping them for years. Some of these individuals were contacted independently. Others were identified to Politico after McCain allies were told of this story.

“He tries to build liaisons and build relationships across all lines, and he’s been very effective at it,” said Art Mobley, a longtime broadcaster in Phoenix who has known McCain for more than two decades.

Trying to get the first black-owned radio station on the air in 1992, Mobley ran into resistance from the Arizona National Guard, which claimed the signal would cause interference problems.

McCain stepped in, he said, and helped get KMJK on the air.

As for the criticism of some African-American leaders, Mobley said they are grumbling over not being sufficiently courted in ways that some blacks have come to expect as a ritual.

“They expect, unfortunately, symbolic gestures from politicians across the board,” Mobley said. “People need to look at substantive policies.”

Even so, symbolism can prove important in presidential campaigns. This could be especially true if McCain finds himself in a general election contest against Democrat Barack Obama, a campaign in which Obama’s precedent-shattering status would virtually guarantee racial issues a prominent role.

McCain’s discomfort with this kind of touchstone politics underscores a central part of his political persona: He has great difficulty feigning interest in subjects in which he lacks genuine personal interest.
Civil rights organizations are hardly unique in this respect. Whatever the constituency or issue, if McCain doesn’t care deeply about it, his feelings tend to be obvious over time.

Further, McCain spent most of his formative years removed from the racial conflicts that played such a central role in the lives of many people in his generation.

He attended prep school and college at overwhelmingly white institutions before entering the military, one of the few integrated professions in the 1950s. And during much of the country’s racial tumult of the 1960s, McCain was in Vietnam, including 5½ years in a prison cell having little contact with the outside world.



Raising a family, flying jets, trying to stay alive and then crafting a post-POW naval career with grievous war wounds, he simply was not immersed in the great themes of the civil rights era.

McCain touched on his own history with one of his state’s most racially charged issues whether to honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday in a speech last week marking the 40th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s assassination.

He offered deep praise for King’s achievements and acknowledged that he had been mistaken in at first opposing a holiday.

“I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona,” McCain said before a heavily black crowd outside the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, drawing cheers after his initial confession had been jeered.

But McCain’s efforts to honor King have not been matched over the years with any attempt to establish connections with black leaders, some say.

“As far as I’ve seen, he has no relationship with the African-American community in Arizona,” said Cloves Campbell Jr., publisher of the Arizona Informant and a Democratic state representative from Phoenix.
“He’s never been to the paper,” said Campbell. “We’ve called to get interviews, but there has never been any response. I’ve never talked to him.”

Founded in 1971 by Campbell’s father, also once a state legislator, the Informant is a weekly that serves the 4 percent of the state’s population that is African-American.

“We’ve had conversations with Kyl several times; we even had [former Rep.] J.D. Hayworth in the office,” said the younger Campbell.

Nor has McCain ever been to his church, Campbell said. Tanner Chapel A.M.E. is the oldest African-American congregation in the state and is located in downtown Phoenix.

“I’ve seen Barack Obama more times in person in my life than I’ve ever seen John McCain,” said Campbell, 46, who backs the Illinois senator.

And should New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton edge out Obama for the nomination, Campbell said, it will be very much in McCain’s interest to mend fences.

“You’re going to see a lot of unhappy black people looking for alternatives,” he noted. “The time is right to start talking to people just in case that does happen.”

McCain’s campaign said that the senator has every intention of competing for the black voter, even against Obama.

“The campaign’s outreach efforts are ongoing, and John McCain is proud of his support in the African-American community,” said spokesman Tucker Bounds. “Whether Sen. McCain is advocating a strong national defense, a revitalized economy or more flexibility in education, he is going to find a receptive audience with African-American voters.”

To underscore his desire to do well in a community that traditionally overwhelmingly supports Democrats, McCain will take a high-profile tour of places such as Alabama’s Black Belt and the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles later this month.

Wes Gullett, a white former McCain staffer in Arizona who is now a top state backer of his old boss, chalked up the animus to mere politics.

“They’re passionately for Barack Obama, a lot of them, so they don’t want to be talking nice about John because it doesn’t help their cause,” he said.

Gullett said McCain worked hard early in his tenure to reach out to Arizona blacks and especially pastors.

But many have passed away since then, he noted, and state politics have grown more partisan.
Still, McCain retains some voices of support in the black faith community.

“He’s fantastic,” said Bishop Henry Barnwell, former pastor of Phoenix’s First New Life Baptist Church, of McCain, noting that the senator had been to his church over the years.

“He’s been very instrumental in assisting us in a number of ways,” said Barnwell, citing McCain’s efforts with congregants stationed at Luke Air Force Base in nearby Glendale.

Now retired, Barnwell served his church for some 40 years and said McCain was a vital ally in his effort to bring the King holiday to Arizona. Mobley, also a mover behind honoring King, similarly praised McCain for his help on the holiday, which the state finally recognized in 1992.

McCain was also friendly with the Rev. Dr. George Brooks Sr., an iconic figure in black Arizona who, as head of the Phoenix-area NAACP and a Presbyterian pastor, led the effort to bring Head Start to the state in the 1960s.

“John McCain is a family friend,” said Brooks’ son, George Brooks Jr. “He and my father had an excellent relationship.”

Yvonne Hunter, a black lobbyist in Phoenix who declined to reveal her partisan leanings, offered an assessment of McCain’s failure to court some black institutions.

“In terms or priorities, it’s just not there,” said Hunter. “But then the majority of African-Americans in Phoenix and Arizona are Democrats.”

Even for McCain allies, the prospect of their friend facing a black candidate this fall has them torn.

After a long pause, Barnwell said he’d support McCain in a matchup against Obama. But Mobley, who has been to McCain’s home and knows his family, said he was unsure.

“I’ve always been supportive of John, but I haven’t made up my mind,” said Mobley, an independent.

Clinton's margin over Obama cut in Pennsylvania: poll


WASHINGTON (AFP) - Senator Barack Obama has cut into Hillary Clinton's lead in Pennsylvania ahead of the state's Democratic presidential primary later this month, according to a new poll published Tuesday.


Clinton, who needs a big win in the eastern state on April 22 to keep her campaign for the party nomination alive, leads rival senator Obama 50 percent to 44 percent, the Quinnipiac University poll showed.

Just last week the poll had Clinton leading Obama by nine points, and the former first lady had a 12-point lead in mid-March, according to Quinnipiac.

The poll, taken over April 3-6, showed Obama picking up women voters, a cornerstone of Clinton's support base.

Quinnipiac said that over the past week Clinton's margin of support among women supporters fell to 54 to 41 percent from 54 to 37 percent.

It also said Obama, vying to become the country's first African-American president, had cut into her support among white voters.

Clinton led among white voters 56 to 38 percent, down from 59 to 34 percent last week.

Obama led among black voters, 75 percent favor the Illinois senator while 17 percent back Clinton.

Clinton prevailed among voters over the age of 55 and Obama had the edge among those under 45.

The two Democrats are engaged in a tight race to amass enough delegates to win the party's nomination and contest the presidential election in November against Republican rival John McCain.

Obama currently leads the race nationally with 1,637 delegates compared to Clinton's 1,502, with 2,025 needed to win the nomination, according to the independent Real Clear Politics website. He also holds a narrow lead in the popular vote in nomination contests.

The poll showed Obama making inroads against Clinton in a state considered perfectly suited to his rival.

"Obama is not only building on his own constituencies, but is taking away voters in Senator Hillary Clinton's strongest areas -- whites including white women, voters in the key swing Philadelphia suburbs and those who say the economy is the most important issue in the campaign," said Clay Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

With Clinton under pressure to score an impressive victory in Pennsylvania, Obama "needs only to come close to be considered the winner" as Clinton has argued she is best placed to compete in large, pivotal states against McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.

The survey of 1,340 voters was carried out from April 3-6 with a margin of error of 2.7 percent.

Monday, April 7, 2008

North Carolina: Obama 56% Clinton 33%

In North Carolina, Barack Obama has opened up a twenty-three percentage point lead over Hillary Clinton. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds that Obama attracts 56% of the vote while Clinton earns 33%. A month ago, Obama's lead was just seven percentage points.

While the absolute numbers are different, the trend is similar to results from Pennsylvania where Obama gained ten-points on Clinton during the month of March.

Perhaps the only disturbing news for Obama in the survey is that most Clinton voters (56%) say they are not likely to vote for the Illinois Senator in the general election against John McCain. A month ago, 45% of Clinton voters said they were not likely to vote for Obama against McCain.

There remains an enormous racial divide in the North Carolina data. Obama leads 86% to 9% among African-American voters. Clinton holds a 47% to 38% advantage among white voters in the Tar Heel State. A month ago, Obama led by fifty-three points among African-Americans while Clinton led by twenty points among White voters.

Obama is viewed favorably by 75% of the state's Likely Primary Voters, up three points from a month ago. Clinton is viewed favorably by 66%, down four since early March.

Nationally, Obama has the edge over Clinton in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

In North Carolina, 52% say that the economy is the top voting issue while 21% name the War in Iraq.

Twenty-eight percent (28%) of Tar Heel Democratic Primary Voters say that Clinton should drop out of the race. Fifteen percent (15%) say the same about Obama. Forty-two percent (42%) say it's Very Likely the Democratic race will remain unsettled until the convention. Another 38% say that is Somewhat Likely. By a 57% to 29% margin, North Carolina voters believe that Obama would be the better candidate against John McCain.

Seventy-seven percent (77%) have followed news stories about Clinton's misstatements about her Bosnia trip. Twenty-three percent (23%) say they are a Very Important issue while 25% say the issue is Somewhat Important. Sixty-three percent (63%) say that most politicians lie or embellish the truth when discussing their own accomplishments.

Just 5% of Democratic Primary Voters in North Carolina rate the economy as good or excellent. Thirty percent (30%) say it's in fair shape while 64% rate current economic conditions as poor. Just 4% say things are getting better while 86% say they are getting worse.

Twenty-seven percent (27%) say the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror while 28% say the terrorists are winning. Just 14% expect the situation in Iraq to get better over the coming six months while 53% say it will get worse.

Rasmussen Markets data just prior to the release of this poll showed Obama was heavily favored to win the North Carolina Primary. Current prices show that Obama has a 93.5 % chance of winning while Clinton is given a 8.0 % chance of victory. Numbers in this paragraph are from a prediction market, not a poll. We invite you to participate in the Rasmussen Markets. It costs nothing to join and add your voice to the collective wisdom of the market.

This telephone survey of 704 Likely Democratic Primary Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports April 3, 2008. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Polls: Race helps Clinton with whites

By ALAN FRAM, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Add this to the divisive debate over race in the presidential campaign: Whites who said race was important in picking their candidate have been about twice as likely to back Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as Sen. Barack Obama.

Exit polls of voters in Democratic primaries also show that whites who considered the contender's race — Clinton is white, Obama is black — were three times likelier to say they would only be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee than if Obama were chosen.

The figures shed some light on race's effect on a competition that moves to the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania, which has a slightly greater proportion of whites than average. The numbers also underscore the challenge Obama could face in the general election, when whites will comprise a larger share of voters and tend to be more conservative than those participating in the Democratic primaries.

Throughout the campaign, Obama has tried to avoid being cast narrowly as a black candidate. Last Friday, he was the only one of the three major presidential contenders to not travel to Memphis, Tenn., to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The only thing Obama can do is keep the campaign about change in the future" while running as "a candidate for the whole country," said David Beattie, a Democratic pollster.

Whites who said race influenced their decision were outnumbered more than six to one by those saying it was insignificant. Whites who say they discounted race also leaned toward Clinton, though by more modest margins.

Obama has trailed Clinton, the New York senator, among whites nationally yet won the white vote in six state primaries. He leads overwhelmingly with blacks.

In the exit polls, whites saying they considered the candidate's race were likelier to be from the South and rural areas, less educated, lower earning and older. That's consistent with voting so far, in which Obama has done better among whites with more education and higher incomes, especially men.

Ohio — which has similar proportions of downscale whites to Pennsylvania — was among the states with higher numbers of whites saying race mattered. Clinton won Ohio's March 4 primary by 10 percentage points. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Clinton with a solid lead in Pennsylvania among whites, while Obama led easily with blacks.

Pollsters have long expressed doubts about using polls to precisely gauge voters' feelings about the sensitive issue of race, concerned that some people give answers they think are socially acceptable.

The phenomenon even has a name, the Bradley effect, after Tom Bradley's losing 1982 run for California governor despite favorable polls, making him one of several prominent black candidates in the 1980s who did worse than surveys suggested. Critics argue that other factors could account for the discrepancies and say white voters' reluctance to support black candidates has diminished since then.

No one doubts some voters are influenced by a candidate's race. The pivotal questions this year are how many are abandoning Obama because he is black, and whether they are offset by others supporting him for racial reasons. Many of this year's primaries have already seen increased turnout among black and younger voters.

"We'd be foolish to say it's not a factor," Harvey Gantt, an Obama supporter who lost two senatorial races against Republican Jesse Helms in North Carolina in the 1990s, said of race.

But Gantt, who was the first black mayor of Charlotte, N.C., said he believes those voting for racial reasons can be offset by higher turnout among blacks and others eager to support a black candidate. He and others said fewer voters are letting a candidate's race outweigh their concerns about issues or political preferences.

So far, the outlook for November is unclear. A poll last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center showed Clinton and Obama both trailing likely GOP nominee John McCain among whites by under 10 percentage points, but some expect Obama's race to be telling.

"You ain't heard nothing at all yet if Obama is the nominee and it's Obama-McCain," said Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Cornell Belcher, an Obama pollster, argued that the candidate has done well with whites in some states and will attract more as the campaign continues.

The exit polls also reveal a tilt toward Clinton, who would be the first female president, by those who strongly considered the candidate's gender. While those saying sex was not a factor leaned slightly toward Obama, six in 10 of those saying gender was important have supported Clinton, including more men. Most said the candidate's gender was not important.

Whites who said race was their top consideration or an important factor preferred Clinton over Obama by 63 percent to 32 percent. Those who said race was not consequential backed Clinton by a narrower 11 percentage points.

Nearly one in three blacks said race was significant in choosing their candidate. Eighty-eight percent of blacks who said race was an important factor voted for Obama, compared to 81 percent of those who said they did not consider race.

At the same time, 41 percent of whites who said race was important said they would only be satisfied if Clinton were the nominee, compared to 14 percent who said they would only be happy with Obama. Another 36 percent said either would be fine.

Whites who said race was not a factor were nearly evenly divided when asked which candidate would satisfy them.

The data is from exit polls in Democratic primaries conducted for The Associated Press and television networks in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Vermont.

In these states, 24,657 voters were asked how strongly they considered race, including 16,764 whites and 5,366 blacks. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 1 percentage point for all people and whites, 2 points for blacks.