In the 1920s, both the city of Denver and its state, Colorado, elected members of the Ku Klux Klan as their chief executives. Yet in August, 2008, Denver, Colorado hosted Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination.
By becoming the first black major party nominee on this spot, Obama's rise suggested the racial demons of America's past have been put to rest.
But have they really?
Certain places where he has had trouble making inroads have led some to ask to what extent race is the reason. The usual suspects are white, working-class voters, particularly in rural and industrial pockets.
But some have posed the question of elderly Jewish voters in South Florida, a place where the Obama campaign has met challenges.Among the askers was The Daily Show, a political satire program that recently sent one of its African-American "reporters," Wyatt Cenac, to find out whether Obama could win the Florida Jewish vote. He pushed State Senator Jeremy Ring on what his constituents' hang-up with Obama was, which the latter attributed to their affection for erstwhile competitor Hillary Clinton."But there's nothing else that they need to, sort of, get over? Nothing at all?" Cenac asked Ring, pointing to his own skin for comedic affect. After an awkward pause, Ring responded, "If you're asking if racism exists, I'd be foolish to say it doesn't, but I don't think it's the overwhelming issue."But another Daily Show interviewee, an elderly woman whose name tag was obscured, said bluntly, "A lot of Jewish white people here will not vote for a black man."
That's a sentiment that Adele Berger has observed among many of the elderly Jews she plays cards with in her condo complex in South Florida. "Schwartze, that's all you hear," said Berger, a senior who supports Obama and has tried to push back against such attitudes, referring to a Yiddish racial slur being used to describe her candidate. "I play cards a couple of nights a week, and I hear it all over."
There are, of course, other reasons why some Jewish Democratic voters, who usually staunchly support the party nominee, have taken issue with Obama - especially for his relative inexperience in foreign affairs and his willingness to speak to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet even so, a strong majority is expected to vote for the Democratic nominee.And assessing the extent to which race is a factor is particularly difficult, since there's never been a black candidate before, and racial views can be hard to poll for.
"It's absolutely uncharted waters," University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Ken Goldstein said, pointing out that there's no empirical evidence on how race factors into the battle for Jewish votes. "It's a big, 1,000-ton elephant. It's not only about Jews. It's about everybody."Particularly all elderly voters, since that group is generally seen as having some of the most trouble with Obama because of his race.Stu Rothenberg, who edits the influential Rothenberg Political Report, and spoke Tuesday at the National Jewish Democratic Council, said that when it comes to Obama's under-performance among seniors, Jewish and other, "I can't rule out the issue of race."
A poll released this week found that about a third of Democrats considered black people "lazy," "violent" and responsible for their own troubles, suggesting that those attitudes could affect November's outcome. (The poll found that Republicans weren't voting for him anyway, regardless of his race.) Conducted by Stanford University in connection with the Associated Press and Yahoo among 1,083 registered Democrats at the beginning of the month with a 3 percent margin of error, the pollsters speculated that such sentiments could well exceed the 2.5 point difference that cost Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry the 2004 election. At the same time, Obama gains at least some voters who are backing him because of his race, according to the poll.Either way, Rothenberg argued that the effect of race can be diffuse, calling it a "cue" that can seep into and shape other perceptions of the candidate. For instance, he suggested, it can raise more questions about Obama's identity and what he really stands for.
FOR SOME white constituencies, that has played into negative attitudes about Obama as an elitist and urbane intellectual - though that isn't his problem with wary Jewish voters, as Jewish vote expert Ken Wald pointed out, joking that his immigrant success story, Ivy League pedigree and law career nearly make him the quintessential nice Jewish boy.In fact, the way those identity questions discomfort Jews feeds largely into the perceptions about his name.
"I don't think that much of it is race," assessed Florida State Senator Steve Geller, an Obama backer who has encountered hostility toward the nominee among his Jewish constituents. "If his name was John James and he grew up in New York, we would have much less of a problem."Instead, Geller fingered the candidate's middle name, Hussein. "It's hard to come up with a worse name in the Jewish community," he said. "The Jews are very concerned about the survival of Israel. I am too. And they're very nervous about somebody named Barack Hussein Obama."
Wald, though, did see race as a significant factor in Jewish doubts about the Illinois senator, saying that "race in terms of black-Jewish issues has become the real issue."Wald, a University of Florida political scientist, distinguished between traditional racism and the posture of the Jewish community, arguing that even schwartze was not as derogatory as other racial epithets."In a sense it's more comfortable with Yiddish, because Yiddish insults everyone," he said. "It's not that they're racist in the conventional sense of the term."Instead, he attributed the racial overtones to the constituency's own experience with the black community during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
"These are people who personally witnessed the breakup of the black-Jewish coalition [and] when it broke up; it left them with a very bitter taste in their mouths," he said. "They feel they're jilted lovers."He described these individuals as feeling that they didn't get the credit they deserved for their civil rights work, and were rudely shown the door by many of the movement's top leaders, some of whom made incendiary statements about Jews. "They felt they were treated badly, and they tend to see the development of black nationalism as something anti-Jewish."
In that context, the revelations about Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who made several comments criticizing Israel and the US, were particularly harmful, because they seemed to prove the lasting effect of that hostility.At the same time, Obama has explicitly tried to recall that earlier era of black-Jewish cooperation to woo Jewish voters, a move that Wald thought could be helpful.Appearing at a Boca Raton synagogue this spring, Obama told the crowd, "I know that I might not be standing here were it not for the historical bond between the Jewish community and the African-American community here in this country in pursuit of justice during the civil rights movement. The reason I raise this is because one of the painful things for me, over the last several years, has been to see the strains between the African-American community and the Jewish community.
"There was a time when we saw common cause in eliminating discrimination and promoting civil rights and promoting civil liberties in this country. That sense of a common kinship of people who have been uprooted, and people who've been on the outside. That strikes me as the very essence of what we should be fighting for. And I want to make sure that I am one of the vehicles by which we can rebuild those bonds."
HILARY SHELTON, director of the Washington office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, maintained that Obama could, indeed, make a difference in reviving the black-Jewish relationship."You're talking about someone who can walk into his garden - the Rose Garden in this case," and then command national attention when calling for an improvement in the relationship, he pointed out. "Of course that will be effective. Of course that will make a difference."Shelton also said that the reactions of some members of the Jewish community need to be put in the American context, where race has been a significant issue nationally, and that, in this respect, he expects Jews to be less swayed by racial bias."The Jewish community is less likely to fall for it, because they know African-Americans better than many other Americans do. They're more likely to say, 'That just doesn't sound right.'"But for all the promise that an Obama victory offers to reviving black-Jewish relations, some have expressed concern about his loss's triggering a backlash in the African-American community if Jews in the swing state of Florida are seen as repudiating their usual party affiliation to vote against Obama in decisive numbers.Shelton said such a perception would be shaped largely by the media, but that "we have a responsibility to make sure that scapegoating does not carry the day."He said it would be important to provide context, such as by asking, "How many people vote in South Florida, and how many people are going to vote in the election? Why don't we blame south Texas?"But District of Columbia Congressman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who participated alongside Shelton at an American Jewish Committee black-Jewish dialogue breakfast during the Democratic National Convention in Denver, dismissed such a scenario. "No one would blame the loss on the Jews. There are a lot of others we could look to, way before we get to" the Jewish community, she said. "Particularly when we lost Florida [in 2000], when we had Al Gore."