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Politics

Hidden Side of Obama's Race Gap

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on

Yet I believe that those who attribute that race-gender gap to white racism are as dangerously unfair and overly simplistic as those who attribute the 95 percent support that black voters gave to Obama to black racism.

I think Sen. James Webb, a Virginia Democrat who retires at the end of this year, makes a good point when he argues that even rural white Southern voters like those who helped him win his seat still can be lured back to "the party of Andrew Jackson." First, he says, Democrats need to get past their current "interest-group politics" and appeal to shared cultural values.

Webb pushed that argument in a July 22, 2010, Wall Street Journal op-ed titled, "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege." Advocating for working-class white males, particularly in the South, as the last group to be left out of affirmative action programs, he cited research data that showed them to be almost as historically underdeveloped educationally and economically as black descendants of slavery.

Republican consultant Mike Murphy, a past advisor to Romney and Sen. John McCain, offered a similar assessment at a Harvard panel last summer. "Democrats have a class model for politics," Murphy said. "They don't understand that the real fault line is culture. And we tend to win the cultural questions."

David "Mudcat" Saunders, a colorfully prominent Virginia-based Democratic strategist, agreed with Murphy. Democrats could win rural white Southerners again with the right "appeal to the culture," he told me, that lures enough persuadable voters from the Republican column.

 

Why, my fellow liberals often ask, do working class voters so often vote for the class that pushes tax cuts for the wealthy? The short answer: Money isn't everything. Nothing connects quite like shared culture to persuade voters that, despite other appearances, you're really on their side.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.


(c) 2012 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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