Obama's candidacy shakes up racial politics

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WASHINGTON -- The contest for the Democratic presidential nomination between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a white woman, and Barack Obama, a black man, has scrambled 21st century identity politics, producing startling turns in an election that, whatever its outcome, will make history.It was former President Bill Clinton who called the racial divide "America's constant curse" in his second inaugural address 11 years ago.But it was after Bill Clinton injected race into the South Carolina primary last month that African Americans, one of the Democratic Party's most important voting blocs, abandoned his wife's candidacy in droves.Obama's novelty is not that he is the first black candidate for president, but the first black candidate who is not running as a black candidate. Obama has scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping, yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match. It was his string of victories in overwhelmingly white states, starting with his upset in Iowa and followed by wins in Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, Maine and elsewhere, that has generated his lead.That attracted black voters stunned that whites would vote for a black man and enable him to win. White voters, especially at higher income and education levels, see in Obama a chance to salve the nation's deep racial wounds.The combination has undergirded an enormous momentum that last Tuesday in Virginia cracked Clinton's hold on Latinos, women and poorer whites.Obama acknowledged this appeal in his victory speech afterward, declaring, "This is the new American majority.""In a matter of months with Barack Obama, we've seen white men support a black man for president," said James Taylor, a race and American politics scholar at the University of San Francisco. "We've seen the country's most pro-black president try to manipulate race against a black candidate. These are some transformational things that are happening in Obama himself. For those who support him, he represents an opportunity to deal with race in an unconventional way."As the son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan, Obama's very genetic makeup "is the African and the American ... what W.E.B. DuBois called the 'double consciousness,' " Taylor said. "Obama, on an emotional level, on a psychological and a visceral level, is an opportunity for America to reconcile this history in an important way."On a practical level, the Clinton errors in South Carolina allowed Obama to broaden his base into a powerful new coalition.Hillary Clinton began with many more African American supporters than Obama. Their loyalty had been cemented during the long economic boom under her husband's presidency, when African Americans and Latinos made big economic strides. "For most of last year, African American voters were more of Hillary's base than Obama's base," said David Bositis, who studies black voting behavior at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. Obama's support, by contrast, was concentrated among the young, the prosperous and the highly educated. It was predominantly male and white. It was the base of former Democratic candidates Howard Dean, Gary Hart and Bill Bradley, Bositis said, "that would always lose."But after Obama pulled out his surprise win in Iowa, the Clintons "panicked ... and began introducing race into the campaign," Bositis said. "It had the opposite effect, I'm sure, of what they intended." Even after Obama sealed his victory in South Carolina, Bill Clinton sought to marginalize the win, comparing it with Jesse Jackson's victories in the same state in 1984 and 1988. African American voters turned decisively to Obama. His margins among black voters soared to 8-1 and even higher. In a matter of weeks, the black support that the Clintons had cultivated over decades vanished, while Obama found the missing key to a winning coalition.With few domestic policy differences separating Clinton and Obama, the patterns that have emerged revolve around age, income, education and the ethnic and racial composition of various voting blocs. Clinton has drawn her highest support from white women, Latinos, seniors and lower-income workers. Obama's inroads among each of those groups in Virginia recast the contest and now threaten Clinton's last hopes in Texas and Ohio on March 4. That race has become an issue in 2008 should come as no surprise in light of enormous immigration-driven population changes, said Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Democrat Network, previously allied with the Democratic Leadership Council headed by former President Clinton."The country is undergoing its most profound demographic change in its history," Rosenberg said. "When I was born, the country was 89 percent white and 10.5 percent African American and 0.5 percent 'other.' Today, it's 66 percent white and 33 percent minority. We've seen a tripling of the minority population in the United States in a very short period of time."(E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead(at)sfchronicle.com) (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)