[Marxism] Electoral Cretinism: super duper Tuesday edition

[Joaquin Bustelo]

	Oh God. This is turning into one of those God-awful big studio
miniseries that were popular a couple of decades ago, or that movie
Groundhog day. The Key "takeaway" is that we've got several MORE rounds of
primaries and caucuses, certainly in the Democratic race, and probably in
the Republican race.

	First, back to basics with the Republicans, namely, the last one
left standing wins: 

	The Christo-fascist wing of the party went big for Mike Huckabee, a
big tent preacher from Arkansas. His chances of winning the nomination are
Zero. It's not that the big money boys aren't about to tolerate another term
of the White House being transformed into the Hick House by someone from
Arkansas. But at least Bill Clinton knew how to read, even though he did
have some problems with the part about "the whole truth and nothing but the
truth" and the verb "to be" in the present tense singular.

	But Huckabee did succeed in showing one thing: Mitt Romney is a fool
for wasting so much money trying to get the Republican nomination. Romney
dumped the Rockefeller Republicanism he inherited from his father and that
he used to win the governorship of Massachusetts to portray himself as the
real conservative in the race. He should have learned from Dad, who famously
said that he'd been "brainwashed" when he visited Vietnam in 1965 to justify
his opportunistic switch from war enthusiast to war critic when he ran for
the 1968 Republican nomination, and that one remark brought his campaign to
an early end after having been considered the front-runner against had-been
Richard Nixon throughout 1967. 

	Huckabee and Romney succeeded in preventing each other from emerging
as a clear alternative to McCain, who true-blue conservatives regard with
the same fear and loathing that die-hard Maoists hold for Trotsky. Thus
although McCain won only three states with a majority of the vote (New York,
N.J. and Connecticut), he will be credited with a total of 9 victories,
including delegate-rich California establishing what is likely to be a 300+
delegate lead over his nearest rivals.

	Republican state party rules in most cases follow winner-take-all
variants. Either the winner of the statewide vote gets all the delegates,
both the three that are allocated to each congressional district and a
varying number of at-large statewide delegates; or the winner in a
congressional district gets all three, and the overall statewide winner gets
the at large. However, some of the southern states set a 50% threshold for
winner take all, otherwise the delegates get parceled out among the
candidates by some quasi-proportional formula. That's going to hurt
Huckabee, who won 7 states but isn't going to get all their delegates by
far, while McCain gets the benefit of having won the biggest prizes,
California and New York, under straight winner-takes-all in one case, under
by district and state in the other.

	McCain now has consolidated his front-runner position, and is just a
step or two away from being declared virtually unbeatable by the
punditocracy, which means everyone else's money will dry up. Although unless
my guesstimates are wrong he can't get a mathematical "lock" on the
nomination until the March 4 primaries and caucuses.

*  *  *

	On the Democratic side, things are becoming ... interesting.

	Obama's support among Blacks is consolidating, inching up from the
3-1 or 4-1 advantages of the previous contests to around ten to one in
places like Georgia. Hillary was reduced to an amazing 2% of the Black male
vote in Illinois -- that's even LESS than Bush got in the Black precincts in
Cynthia McKinney's district in the 2004 elections.

	And in most of the country, but especially the South, he continues
to drive massive increases in Black turnout relative to whites, and within
the whites, in massive increase in turnouts among young people relative to
older folks. But -- the reason you don't see big increases in voting by
Seniors is that most of them already voted in previous years. I think "Obama
mania" is the form that it takes among Blacks and many whites, especially
younger ones, but there is a TREMENDOUS push by regular people to take hold
of the machinery of socalled "democracy" to CHANGE things. Obama and his
friends have been truly gifted in figuring out how to give voice to this
inchoate desire out there, and he could well ride this wave all the way to
the White House.

	Thus he won the majority of last night's contests, and is in the
lead in the one race remaining to be called, New Mexico.

	But Hillary won, and won very big, in California, which is the
motherlode of Democratic delegates, with 370 of the 2025 needed to win the
nomination to be awarded on the basis of last night's vote.

	It is in California where things got very strange, because she won
by rolling up a HUGE advantage among Latinos and Asians to overcome Obama's
advantage from his big majority among Blacks (even though the Black turnout
was fairly normal) and a small but significant Obama lead AMONG WHITES,
according to the original exit poll data. 

	(If you check the exit poll data now, it will show Hillary with a
small lead among whites, because exit polls are adjusted on the basis of
actual votes. Thus if you poll 100 people at a precinct, and they come out
50-50 in the poll, but the vote there comes out 60% in favor of Clinton,
then the responses to the exit poll from that precinct are re-weighted
accordingly. In California the exit poll suggested a smaller Hillary victory
than the counts indicate.

	(In at least one well-documented case, Florida in 2000, it is
clearly true that the original exit poll data more accurately reflected the
intent of the voters than the actual count, and therefore than the
"adjusted" poll, which reversed a slight Gore lead for a slight Bush lead.
Given the large number of votes normally annulled in U.S. presidential
elections [typically, 2%, but often as high as 5%-6% in specific
closely-fought states] the practice of statistically adjusting exit polls is
questionable. Also questionable is the oft-heard charge that exit polls have
a "liberal bias." The evidence suggests, on the contrary, that voting
mechanisms and counting have a clear bias against poorer people, people with
less education, older people, and so on, or put another way, have a bias FOR
white middle-class voters. 

	But back to California. Surprisingly the percentage of Black voters
(6%) is less than in previous years (8% in 2004). But there was a massive
tsunami of Latino voters who went from being 16% (2004) or 17% (2000) of the
voters in the Democratic primary to 29%, and giving Hillary a 31 percent
lead over Obama among Latinos. 
	
	The proportion of Asian voters surpassed that of Blacks at 8%,
doubling 2004's percentage. And they gave Hillary roughly a 3-1 lead over
Obama.

	Now here is what is really Gonzo: the total number of votes in the
Democrat primary appears to have shot up from 2.74 million in 2004 to
perhaps 4.06 million this time (right now only 97% of the vote is counted,
so that is a projection). That's a JUMP of around 50%. 

	For Latinos, that suggests an increase from around 440 thousand to
1,175,000 voters --- close to tripling the turnout. And for Asians, a
turnout increase from 110,000 to 325,000. 

	But these figures also suggest that the change in Black turnout was
small, if any.

	The conclusion you'd have to draw is that, unlike in the rest of the
country, Obama-mania hasn't really fired up Black communities in California,
but has had an even greater impact among whites than elsewhere.

	But it is clear, not just from California, but from throughout the
country that Obama-mania has definitely NOT taken hold in the Latino
community. For example, in Illinois, Obama's home state, he got barely half
of the Latino vote, his worst showing in any racial/ethnic group there, even
though Hillary did not sharply challenge him there, and he trounced her
2-to-1 overall. Only among Latinos and retirees was Clinton able to fight
Obama to a draw or almost in Illinois. And Clinton's single strongest
demographic in Illinois --pretty much the only one she won outright-- was
Latino women.

*  *  *

	The meme being pushed by the bourgeois press is that basically this
is due to prejudices against Blacks among Latinos. Latinos are essentially
being typecast as the new crackers. 

	It is true that there has been in many areas frictions between Black
and Latino communities. But it is also true that many Black candidates in
urban areas, as well as some Latinos, have forged socalled "Black-Brown"
electoral coalitions to take control of city hall, congressional districts
and so on. And offhand, I can't think of a single example of a "Black-white
cracker" coalition that's ever been put together anywhere in the country.
Coalitions with the more liberal minority of whites and especially white
Democrats and Independents, yes. But with bigots? No way.

	And I think Hillary's success in the Latino community isn't hard to
understand, and I suspect this will be in part applicable to the Asian
community as well. She's been a central figure on the national political
stage for a decade and a half. She carries with her the mantle of Bill
Clinton, which even moreso for Hispanics than anyone else in this country,
is now seen as a golden age, compared to what has come since. Back in those
days you could get a drivers licenses, immigration raids steadily declined,
it was easy enough to get a job with any scrap of paper. Kids went to
college. You could file appeals in many immigration cases.

	You may think, but those things don't affect "legals." That's where
you would be wrong. "Legals" and the undocumented are inextricably
intertwined in most of our communities. Multi-status families are
everywhere, and the undocumented part of the community is so big that if
their fortunes decline, those of the whole community decline -- supermarkets
lay off workers because sales are down, small businesses go kaput, "our"
radio stations get sold (we recently "lost" one in Atlanta to ...
Koreans!?), house prices decline, and so on.

	And you may know that many of the things that have happened to the
community were initiated, not by Bush, but by Bill Clinton, only that they
came into effect or began to be more widely enforced after a few years.
That's true of the drivers licenses, which was a federal mandate from the
Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform, as well as barring undocumented students
from state colleges and universities (by making them pay out-of-state
tuition and fees) which was part of the immigration reform of the same
epoch, as well as a blanket denial of the right to appeal in many
immigration cases. 

	But virtually no one in the media knows that, and even fewer in the
community, and even those that know won't call Hillary on it, rationalizing
their silence with the idea that these were measures the Republicans IMPOSED
on Clinton and it would be unfair to blame good old Bill for them.

	And something else. During the years those measures were beginning
to bite, the overall press corps was otherwise preoccupied with the quantity
and quality of presidential blow jobs and what a depraved pervert President
Clinton was for behaving like a well-brought-up Southern gentleman and
protecting the reputation of a young lady that had favored him in this way
by lying about what they'd done.

	So Hillary isn't just Hillary, she's Billary and that works to her
advantage among Latinos. As for herself, being one of the three or four most
prominent Democrats since going into the Senate, she is perceived as having
opposed attacks on immigrants, which the Latino community as a whole has
pretty much viewed as an attack on itself, and in broad strokes supported
legalization, which is what Latinos want. She is seen as generally
progressive and pro-working people, as these things are judged in the U.S.
political spectrum, and especially as that spectrum is presented and
represented in the Spanish language media, which is even MORE simplified and
LESS nuanced than the English language media. True she made a mistake voting
for the war, but she's since changed her view and is going to get us out.
That's pretty much how she is seen and portrayed.

	Obama, on the other hand, is pretty much a complete newcomer. True,
he was a big hit in the 2004 Democrat convention, but perhaps up to half of
the Latino citizens are Spanish-dominant, and very unlikely to have watched
that performance. And although there were reports on Obama now and then,
this section of the Latino voters who watch Spanish-language TV or read
Spanish-language newspapers has largely been spared the bouts of talking
heads and speculation and so on about Obama that have taken place in the
English media that year and since. In Spanish language news, except for a
rare blip, Obama appeared on the radar in a significant way only in the last
six weeks or so -- and for Californians, most of all in the last couple of
weeks, since he started running ads. 

	And something else to understand about the Spanish-language media.
It's much less obsessed with U.S. politics than the English language media.
This media also covers extensively Latin American politics. Obama competes
not just with Hillary and the Republicans for space and attention, but with
Chavez and Lula and Kirchner and Evo Morales, and whatever nuance of a word
or phrase that in English differentiates him from Hillary in the eyes of
young whites, for example, in the Spanish language media gets lost because
of the much broader political spectrum. Among Americans, the difference
between committing to withdraw all troops in 16 months (Obama) and trying to
withdraw all troops in 16 months (Hillary) might seem quite distinct; but
when the next item is Hugo Chavez denouncing the savagery of the American
soldiers in Iraq, the differences in tone and stance between a Hillary and
an Obama simply disappear.

	And the truth is that their issue differences are miniscule, even
within the conventional U.S. political spectrum. 

	But Obama's problem with Latinos goes even deeper, I think. 

	If you look at the 18-29 demographic, Obama's strongest, especially
among whites in the exit polls, he doesn't do relatively better among young
Latinos than among Latinos as a whole. And in this group, you're likely to
find English speakers predominate, either native born or who became citizens
before age 18 when their parents became citizens, or who became citizens as
very young adults after having been at least partly raised and educated in
this country. And again, Obama here gets no bounce at all.

	So this is obviously, to put it in American terms, a
"race"-differentiated thing, but I don't think it is mostly a question of
prejudice (even unconscious prejudice), of racism on the part of Latinos,
but of something else.

	That something else is that, quite simple, Obama's message, his tone
and stance is not resonating with the Latino community, it is out of step
with their experiences, while Clinton's message ... or not her message
exactly, but more of an impression that people have of what she'd be like as
President ... is being better received.

	First it should be noted that Latinos (and the California turnout
suggests this is as true for Latinos as much as for any other group) have
become much more political, are much more interested and engaged in THIS
campaign than the one four or eight years ago. And in general, I think the
reasons that all other working people, who have been completely alienated by
the Bush administration, are engaged and trying to change things apply also
to Latinos.

	In addition, The Latino community, or many of them, at any rate,
have been in a pretty sharp recession for a year or two. You won't find it
in the official statistics, but talk to small businesses or chambers of
commerce and they will tell you its true. Two things have driven this
recession. One is a sharp pullback in spending by the undocumented, many of
whom have stopped making long-term purchases and trying to build up at least
a small emergency fund. The other is the collapse of housing contraction,
which has not been translated into many official job losses in government
statistics precisely because so much of the labor force was undocumented and
had already been transferred off the employment rolls through mechanisms
like declaring them to be "self employed." [This, BTW, is one of the reasons
why all the BS in the media about the tremendous "entrepreneurial spirit" in
the Latino community needs to be taken with a grain of salt. At least until
recently, undocumented people have been safer and less visible if in the
legal status of working on their own account --even if it is a complete
fiction-- than as formal employees.]

	This recession has come on top of a series of unrelenting attacks,
taking away drivers licenses, taking away the possibility of going to
college for the kids, increased hostility from police, increased racial
profiling, a sharp increase in deportations from the interior of the
country, and a whole social atmosphere of scapegoating and persecution.

	Now, on these issues, I think Obama is clearly better than Hillary,
not qualitatively, but better. He is unambiguous (at least now) about giving
the undocumented a path to citizenship and not just legalization. He says he
is for drivers licenses. He promises to take this up his very first year in
office. And he really has been quite decent in denouncing the scapegoating
of Latinos, whereas Hillary has been pandering to racist sentiments and
narratives, albeit it in a cautious and not a gross way.

	But he hasn't been very sharp in drawing out those differences, and
certainly hasn't gone on the attack against Hillary on them, and even if he
tried I don't think it would work. In the community, and in the country as a
whole, the debate has been framed in terms of deport them all (or make life
so impossible they "self-deport") versus some kind of legalization -- and in
reality, ANY kind of legalization AT ALL. 

	For the community, the most important thing being for how many, and
how soon, and not at all how "generous" a legalization in terms of achieving
permanent residence and eventually citizenship and other details on which,
the way Obama frames his answers, is clearly meant to communicate he will
offer the undocumented a better deal than Hillary would.

	What is failing for Obama in the Latino community, and this may be
irremediable, is his overall tone and message, the "Kennedyesque" tone and
message of the torch being passed to a new generation, of drawing the
American nation together for great and worthy  goals, of coming to a new
sense of common purpose and all the rest of it. And he invites and calls on
the Latino community to be part of this, to stand up, to step forward, to be
proud. 

	Except that, just about now, what THIS community wants, its mood, is
simply to be let alone. Latinos want to go back to being the invisible
minority, remembered in cinco de mayo pieces about how hard working we are,
and out of sight and out of mind the rest of the time. The community is
tired of being the punching bag of the right wingers. The community doesn't
want to be at the center of a big controversy or a big struggle because even
when we win, we lose. We're not standing up, we're ducking, and sometime
AFTER all those bats and bullets flying around stop doing so, maybe THEN
we'll take a peek.

	The big spring offensive against the Sensenbrenner Bill two years
ago defeated that bill, but the result was a million and one
mini-Sensenbrenner bills in states, cities and towns across the country;
increased harassment from the Feds; and a move to the RIGHT by our "friends"
like McCain, Clinton, Kennedy and so on trying to find "common ground" with
the yahoos to get an immigration reform with some sort of legalization done.

	[To avoid false polemics: this is not an approach I am ADVOCATING;
it is a situation I am DESCRIBING. And yes, I understand the community will
have to stand up and mobilize and all the rest of it. But I'm not discussing
what the community OUGHT to do but simply WHY Obama hasn't caught fire among
Latinos like he has elsewhere. And, yes, I understand ALSO that these things
can change VERY quickly. But I am no oracle, just a humble hack. I make no
predictions based on visions, only projections based on current trends.]

	So Hillary is attractive to the Latino community for the same
reasons that she is attractive to older voters. Although she's been trying
to ratchet up her "inspirational" side, she is stable, mature, competent
and, yes, even a little old and boring. The things regular people consider
disastrous about Bush -- the war, and increasingly the economy, which they
see tied not so much to the war as to the deficits and unfair tax giveaways
to the rich -- she will fix, more or less, and make incremental changes and
improvements to various things. 

	She's got one BIG IDEA -- health care reform -- and the outlines of
a plan (thanks to Edwards) that all the analysts and gasbags and policy
wonks will say (they've already started) is actually politically viable. For
the right, it has plenty of room for profiteering "private enterprise" and
"free choice." For the left, it has the beginnings of what could become in
essence a government single payer system. 

	And that's OK with people looking for a "safe" choice to "undo" as
much as possible the Bush years. People understand that the American health
scare system is completely bonkers, needs to be fixed, so while a little
scary, even more terrifying is another 10 or 20 years of rising medical
prices and insurance "gotchas." 

*  *  *

	I think there is also something else. I've mentioned that when I
asked my kids (ages 17 and 13) why they supported Obama, they both said (in
different conversations), because he's Black. And I've talked to some of
their friends and often gotten the same answer. To people outside the U.S.
it is going to sound strange, but I think it is a highly political
statement. It suggests to me that among certain layers of the population,
and especially young people, who didn't live through the civil rights
movement but were born decades later, and learned a rather sanitized version
in U.S. history classes and popular culture, "Black" is a powerful political
brand, the name of a party that doesn't yet exist except as a current or,
better yet, a bundle of aspirations. 

	I think Black is identified, first and foremost, with the figure of
Martin Luther King in U.S. history, who represents social justice, the
courage to fight for it, and the wisdom to fight for it in civic ways that,
even if not understood at that moment, are really in the interests of
society as a whole. I think it is identified with peace, and the civil
rights movement and anti-Vietnam War movement are usually covered together
in High School, sometimes with a little bit of the Beatles, "give peace a
chance" and youth culture thrown in. And then I think this gets mixed in
with moods that sweep the population or parts of it. One 13 or 14 year old
girl who told me she was for Obama because he's Black brought up that he'd
do something about rewarding executives with hundreds of millions of dollars
for firing people. Another (of East Asian origin, although I'm not sure how
conscious she is of not being "white") said he wouldn't be breaking up
families with deportations, because that was like what the slaveowners used
to do.

	There's a whole complex of issues and attitudes tied in with the
history of Black people in this country and the historic gains of the Black
movement in the civil rights area that, through Obama's inspired use of the
change meme, projecting a change that somehow transcends political
divisions, is leading to this crystallization of the "Black" political brand
among younger white (and other) folks.

	I don't believe that's what Black is in the Black community BTW. I
think there is a parallel thing there, but a distinct and different
phenomenon.

	And I don't sense that there is this sense of "brand identity"
attached to "Black" in the Latino community, or very, very little. Black
Americans for many people are seen as a kind of American, and the community
right now feels to persecuted and stepped upon by Americanism so as to
attach a great positive value to it. 

	In summary, I think these are the main factors involved in Obama's
weak showing among Latinos:

- He started just weeks ago as a virtual unknown against a household name,
especially among the Spanish-dominant.

- What differentiates him from Hillary in the U.S. political context doesn't
do so nearly as much in the Spanish-language media and political context.

- The overall optimistic tone and message of hope/unity of his campaign is
out of sync with the downcast mood of the community after years of
unrelenting attacks.

- The political "brand" of Black doesn't carry with it the same associations
among Latinos as it does among younger white people (and others) in the
United States.

	This then has translated into a whole series of other disadvantages,
including that he has no top-rank Latino political or cultural stars in his
corner; he has no well developed network of contacts in the Latino press; he
has not network of political activists/clubs working for him in the
community, or very few; and so on.

	What role would prejudice or bias --even unconscious-- against Black
people play in this? It would be foolish to say that it doesn't exist,
because racism permeates every pore of this society. It is a REALITY that
Black occupy a socially inferior position in this society (as do Latinos),
and that this social reality then finds expression in the consciousness of
people, especially in this society where everyone is taught from the day
you're born that this is the land of opportunity and equality and those that
don't get ahead it's because they're lazy or shiftless or --frankly-- not
very intelligent. And this "land of opportunity" ideology is very strong in
the Latino community. And then that gets put together with all sorts of
overt and subtle racist propaganda. Like, it's been mentioned a lot on TV
that the fight for the nomination is getting "racially polarized" because
Black folks are voting for one of their own. But Hillary getting large
majorities of white folks voting for her doesn't get presented the same way.

	But I don't think the prejudices or even unconscious biases of
Latino Democrats are any greater than those of white Democrats; and in fact
they're probably less. As victims of racism themselves, I think many/most
Latinos instinctively or consciously understand it better that whites. 

So racist attitudes on the part of Latinos might make it somewhat harder for
Obama to break through with his message, but that's all. 

The real problem I think is that Obama has managed to come up with a message
well-suited to his overall audience in the Democratic Party but one that
just doesn't play well with Seniors, for example, or with Latinos. Given
that, the lack of any big differentiating issues between Obama and Clinton,
and Clinton's huge lead in terms of being better known, Obama has a hard
time getting traction, getting people to actually pay attention and listen
to him. To the extent he has gotten attention in sectors where his message
doesn't really resonate with the majority of people, it's due to his big
success in other sectors, and then the media hype and hoopla. But that can
only get you so far. 

	I don't think unless Obama is somehow able to reframe his message in
a way that comes across well to Latinos, but without diluting its power
among other sectors, that he is likely to change things qualitatively in the
Latino community. 

	As for the overall competition for the Democratic nod, I think it is
increasingly up in the air. The Democrats use a complicated system of
proportional representation by congressional district and then also for the
statewide delegates. It doesn't look to me like either candidate right now
is set to capture a large enough part of the 3,250 or so ELECTED delegates
to get to the 2025 "magic number" that ensures the nomination. This means
the race will be decided by the 800 or so "super delegates" --members of
congress and other notables. Hillary had an early lead of about 190 or so of
these -- but Obama has been closing the gap, and now has about 100. There
are probably not many more out there for Hillary unless she can convincingly
show she can put a lock on the nomination. Whereas Obama likely has people
who would prefer him, or anybody BUT Hillary, but didn't want to commit to a
losing cause, a non-viable candidate. They might be willing to do so now.
And they might be honestly motivated by the excitement and activity that
Obama's campaign is generating, which is way more than what Hillary is
generating.

Joaquín