Obama polling and the elephant in the room

Over 80% of Americans believe the county is headed in the wrong direction.  Management of the country has been, largely, in Republican hands for the last 8 years.  Simple a + b = c arithmetic should suggest Americans ought to be distrustful of placing another Republican in the White House to guide foreign and domestic economic policies. 

But one would never know it from the presidential polling.  Despite a widespread revulsion over Republican policy, Barack Obama and John McCain are fairly close.  Sometimes within the margin of error.  Now the pundits will argue it's a result of John McCain's strengths as a candidate, or Barack Obama's thin resume or celebrity status.  But, let's face it, there's more than likely another factor here keeping Barack Obama from walking away with this election.

Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black? “Of course it is,” says another prominent Republican operative. “It’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about, but it’s obviously a huge factor.”

With the Jeremiah Wright fiasco, Obama was stripped of his post-racial image, transformed in the eyes of many whites from a candidate who happened to be black into a black candidate. And now he faces a Republican machine intent on blackening him further still. Add to that his exotic background (Kenyan father, Indonesian upbringing), his middle name, his urbanity and intellectualism, and the scale of the challenge ahead for him comes into sharp relief. Whereas Reagan was an otherwise familiar archetype who needed to convince America that he was neither senile nor crazy, Obama has to make the country comfortable with the most unusual profile of any person ever to come within spitting distance of occupying the White House—while at the same time preventing the election from becoming a race consumed by race.

What’s clear, however, is that among older, less-educated white voters, there is a pronounced, albeit inchoate, unease with Obama’s “otherness”—one that the McCain operation is moving swiftly to exploit, with what promises to be an increasingly race-freighted campaign.  The images in its recent ads are ingeniously coded, and thus easily misread (or denied).  This sort of appeal is part of a long, ignoble, often devastatingly effective tradition in the GOP—now updated for a more sophisticated, media-savvy, and scrutiny-heavy era, in which overt race-baiting might not play.

The truth is that ignoring race is not an option for Obama. Nor is simply changing the subject. What he needs is to find a way of talking not directly about race or racial politics but about his identity that at once elevates and grounds the conversation, that elucidates, soothes, inspires. That takes the air out of the attempts to make him seem foreign, not one of us. That places him squarely at the center of the American narrative, connecting him to values and experiences white voters—especially older ones—can readily grasp. (Link)

It would be stupid to suggest those opposing Barack Obama are rascists.  I reckon most have legitimate concerns about his candidacy; experience, age, conduct, history.  But it would be equally stupid to deny some voters will not vote for Barack Obama because he's African American. 

At the end of the day, the presidential candidates have to convey an understanding and empathy for voters concerns, a plan for addressing them, and a vision for a prosperous, peaceful future.  We've sure been tricked before and, to my mind, someone's out there trying to trick us again.  The task at hand for Barack Obama (and it is, indeed, a huge task) is toconvince Americans the first viable African American contender, the one with a foreign sounding name, IS that candidate.