Politics: Clinton takes PA

If only, if only, if only.

If only Obama could have pulled off PA, then this once-historic, now historically grueling, primary season would be over. Instead, despite a serious cash problem, Clinton will slog ahead to the May 6 contests in North Carolina and Indiana. North Carolina is the last remaining big prize in the race -- and both camps are predicting Obama will win it. He's outspending her there already, by wide margins. She's out of money, and there just aren't enough delegates left up for grabs for her to seize victory.

Weeks ago I supported Clinton's decision to keep fighting; it ain't over till it's over, and I figured she was well within her rights to battle it out to the finish. Of course she still has the right to go on, but by every analysis I've read, she simply can't win, barring some miracle. And as the Democrats have continued duking it out, we've watched in the polls as McCain has gained ground. Whether he would have made the same progress if there had been a clear Democratic nominee is a question that's beyond my sophistication to answer, but my intuition is that this primary has moved out of the healthy range and into destructive territory.

Of course I have no expertise as a social scientist or as an expert on Pennsylvania voters. However, I am a newly minted Pennsylvanian, so I will offer a word or two, based on my experiences and observations here, on possible reasons for Obama's loss.

First, let's not underestimate the role of race. People out here are quite friendly and accepting, for the most part. We've never had a problem. Been welcomed everywhere we go. There is no overt racism to speak of. Yet our little local newspaper saw no problem with running a column that quoted, at length and in support of, Pat Buchanan's deeply offensive thoughts on race (brazenly titled "A Brief for Whitey"), part of which read:

Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America. Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to. This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these: First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American. Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

I plan to devote another post to refuting this nonsense, but for now my only point is that a community might still have a tiny problem with race if this kind of thing passes muster in its local paper without any kind of outcry. Perhaps we live in the kind of place where people are ready enough to be friendly toward a black person in a supermarket, but not quite ready enough to have one as their president.

That kind of racism -- let's call it Stage Two Racism -- is subtle. It's not KKK-style racism. It's almost a vestigial form of the illness, a faint, lingering distrust of the other, a last pyschological clinging to the status quo despite one's better angels. The danger is that people in that mindset are vulnerable to exploitation by the forces that have been out to destroy Obama's candidacy.

Two days after Obama delivered his "More Perfect Union" speech (text here, video here) to overwhelmingly positive reviews, I ran into a fellow father-to-be who had been in our childbirthing class. He brought up the subject of politics and told me he was deeply troubled by Obama's pastor. I asked him if he had heard Obama's speech on race, whose purpose had been to distance himself from his pastor's stance as well as to explain some of the anger of Wright's generation. "No," the guy told me. "But I heard that it was just awful."

Where he heard that, I can only imagine.

I've also heard people around me who are troubled by the "bitter" comments. To quote one local: "I wouldn't vote for him, not after what he said about us Pennsylvanians."

So the unfortunate truth is that this sort of thing works. You get people focused on nonsense (what somebody's preacher said, how well they bowl, how they tried to explain away people's voting tendencies) instead of on substantive issues like getting out of Iraq, achieving energy independence, improving healthcare, salvaging the economy. Just keep repeating the most fatuous, least substantive drivel, making your appeal to the darkest part of the soul or the most childish, superficial part of the mind, and you can get people to believe that those are the "issues" that count.

And of course then the media will feel free to keep pushing that stuff (the stuff the Beltway scribes really get excited about), because, after all, their hands are tied; you see, they'd love to write about the issues, but this petty stuff is all the people care about.

The good news: May 6 is only two weeks away, and that will be a perfect time for Hillary to leave the field with honor.

The bad news: The elevation of the petty over the significant will only continue once it's McCain versus Obama -- and the Washington press corps is addicted to its pro-McCain script, so we can expect the balance of the trivial crap to settle onto Obama's side of the ledger.