Now I'm Not Racist, But...

If you ever hear yourself say the title of this post, or catch yourself writing it, say on facebook, then STOP!!! immediately, and rethink what you're about to say and/or write, and maybe large pieces of your worldview.  Saw a post on facebook, no details because I don't know the guy, but also because I fought and fought and fought against writing this in his feed and then couldn't find the post again anyway.

Essentially though, the guy posted two screenshots from CNN, I think, showing that Romney had won about 60% of the white vote and Obama won about 95% of the black vote and determined from this that Obama won the election because of racism.  I don't even know where to start with this, frankly.  I'm inclined to write this off as the uninformed opinion of an uninformed person; but the sheer level of ignorance involved here is, frankly, appalling.

First of all, historically since 1968 (post Civil Rights Act/Voting Rights Act) and also around the time exit-polling started) only a couple of Democratic presidential candidates have dipped below 85% of the African-american vote.  It's not at all unusual for the Democrat to have over 90% of African-americans support them.  Someone in that feed claimed Clinton received 83% of black votes.  The only chart i could find http://kingpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/06/chart-black-vote-in-1968-1972-1976-1980.html

put Clinton's share of the African-american vote at 91% in in 1992 and 93% in 1996.  But then there's also this:

The United States Census reported that 58 % of African Americans were voting in the presidential election of 1964. African Americans were voting Democratic 82% of the time. This number would swell to 92 % by 1968. With the exception of the 1972, 1984, and the 1992 elections Blacks would continue to give at least 80% of their collective votes to the Democratic presidential candidate says Minion K.C. Morris in African Americans and Political Participation.

http://suite101.com/article/african-american-voting-patterns-a63891

So, who has the right number?  I don't know.  In fact, how sure are we that Obama got 95%?  He definitely got 90% plus, but that isn't really unusual.  Even 95% wouldn't really be out of line with what we've seen since a Democratic president and a Democratic congress (with it's true, Republican support needed to counter-balance the southern votes) finally made sure that all citizens of this country could exercise their right to vote.  No matter where they lived or what color their skin was.  The bottom line is, to say that 95% of blacks voting for Obama purely out of racial feeling, is very, very close to saying that African-americans are too dumb to know what's good for them.

Whereas the truth is that blacks simply have better memories than Republicans would like.  They remember Reagan's stories about black welfare queens driving cadillacs and Jesse Helms' racist campaign ads, not to mention George Bush the Elder's Willie Horton ad.  They saw all the same old southern Democratic racist office holders like Strom Thurmond switch parties and become Republicans without missing a beat.  They know who defends affirmative action and who would eliminate it.  They remember David Duke.  They remember Trent Lott wishing Strom Thurmond had won his campaign for the presidency, saying we wouldn't have had all these problems if he had won.  They haven't forgotten Trayvon Martin.  They saw what happened this year and over the last couple years as Republican governors and legislatures enacted laws designed to keep minorities away from the polls.  Eliminating or reducing early voting, especially on weekends and Sundays, when black churches hire buses to go to the polls.  Requiring state id cards that a lot of minorities or even simply poorer people just don't have.  They heard Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai say that the Voter ID law would let Mitt Romney win in Pennsylvania.  They know who the 47% is.

Republicans don't get the fact that their actions matter more than their words.  You can't spend years working to kick latinos out of the country and expect to get their votes.  You can't use black people as a boogie man to scare white voters and try to disenfranchise the poor and the brown and expect them to turn around and vote for you.  Not even if you trot out every minority that's ever been in your party every 4 years at your conventions.  It's not racism for 95% of blacks to vote for Obama, it just means that 95% of blacks are smart.  As opposed to only about 39% of whites...

Obama Only Won Because....

The new conservative myth-making has already begun. I was pretty confident that Obama would win re-election and I even liked the D's chances to gain seats in the Senate. I was hesitant however to make any kind of sweeping predictions because I'm the guy that simply could not understand George Bush's appeal. I looked at him and saw no way he could beat Al Gore. And I saw even less chance for him to beat John Kerry, not because Kerry was so great, but rather now the country had gotten an eyeful of the actual George Bush. Alas, it didn't start to come apart for Bush until immediately after the election. I was hesitant to call anything for Obama or the other D's this time because I've been wrong before. This time though, I trusted the polls, and they turned out to be correct.

The crazy crusading right wing however, is already working on the new myths of how Obama won. Some traditional stuff, old favorites like "The Media Favors the Democratic Candidate Forever and Always", with some puzzling new refrains like "Obama Has Built A Vast Coalition That No Other Democrat Will Be Able to Mobilize". And of course, "Romney Was Not a Good Enough/Conservative Enough Candidate", or the alternate take "Romney Did Not Explain the Conservative Position Well Enough". Despite the fact that candidates like Akin and Mourdock who DID explain the conservative position also got smoked. And of course they point to the GOP's success in the House races and Ted Cruz's Senate victory as proof that the Tea Party is not the problem, the GOP establishment is the problem. I'll get to their fantasies in a second, first up, I'll explain why and how Obama actually won the election.

First of all, he identified his likely opponent early, and spent a lot of time and money introducing that opponent to the public on his own terms. Instead of suddenly meeting Mitt Romney, awesome business man who saved the Olympics and can totally save America too in late July or August sometime, people started hearing about Bain Capital and Romney's tax returns and Let Detroit Go Bankrupt during the spring. That is, instead of waiting for Romney to leisurely start his campaign the way D's usually do, Obama said I have an advantage here, and I'm going to use it. Romney was playing defense the rest of the year.

Second, the Republican Party's BS is old and tired. The only message that Mitt Romney could give out without having half of his own party all over him every day is that if we just hand out another round of tax cuts and eliminate a few more regulations, then the magical Job Creators will appear and trickle down our Heart's Desire. But, he's also not allowed to increase the deficit, so he has to have a magical way to pay for his tax cuts which he... never really got around to explaining. To be fair, there is still a large segment of the population for which this is wine-flavored honey to their quivering, longing, aching ears; but this is not a line of argument that is going to win new voters to your cause.

Third, it is true that Mitt Romney was a terrible candidate that did stupid things like clockwork, pretty much every week and only managed to make himself look good compared to Obama once in the whole campaign; but honestly, the other candidates the Repubs had to choose from were even worse. Remember Michelle Bachmann? Or Pizza Guy? Or Newt Gingrich, who would have entered the race with more than half the country hating his guts? Or Ricky Santorum, who's main claim to fame was managing to reintroduce contraception as a campaign issue? Or, hey, remember Jon Huntsman? Yeah, me neither. However, none of this can really excuse what a historically awful campaign Romney ran. Until he got in Obama's face in the first debate even his own backers were getting ready to write him off. If the mainstream media was really as far in the tank for Obama as conservative like to suggest, then an idiot that ran a campaign as bad as Romney's would never even have made it to the debates. And let's not forget that Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote is going to end up at about 2%. Romney still did incredibly well for a doofus that told his donors that 47% of the country are freeloading dolts that will never vote for him because they have no self-respect.

Fourth, the Obama campaign combined a realistic electoral strategy with a ferocious get out the vote campaign. In contrast, the Republicans seemed to fall back on their tried and true efforts to stop people they don't like from voting. Now, again, the margins in the swing states were mostly very thin, so presumably the Republicans get out the vote efforts were also very effective. However, the Obama campaign correctly identified the states where their efforts could make the most difference, crafted a message designed to appeal to those states, and didn't spend time in states that were essentially off the board. That their strategy and ground game were effective is virtually proven by the fact that they won every state they targeted, except for North Carolina. Which was a stretch this year, but in 4 years?

Now it is true that the Republican candidate labors under a disadvantage in our current electoral climate. The realities of Democratic strength in the Northeast, Great Lakes and West Coast mean that the Republican candidate has far fewer plausible paths to 270 electoral votes. Example, while the Romney campaign dragged their feet on admitting that Ohio had put Obama over the top, Obama won Colorado, Iowa and Nevada, which made the Ohio results moot. Basically, to catch up and then pass President Obama, Romney had to win some combination of Florida, Ohio and Virginia and then move onto some combination of Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, or New Hampshire. Obama, on the other hand, only ever needed one of the first three, and then maybe two of the second five. Or he could have just won all of the second five. Or two of the first three alone. Point being, Obama didn't really have any "must-win" states whereas Romney HAD to win Florida and either Ohio or Virginia just to stay in the game until the later poll closings.

Fifth and final, the Obama campaign recognized that the electorate changed in the last four years, especially in the swing states. That's part of what made them swing states. In 2004, the Republicans losing Virginia would have been a disaster of inestimable proportions. In 2012 the polls gave Obama something like a 70% chance to take Virginia pretty much from the get-go. Basically, the future is now. Obama won with 40% of the white vote and 80% of everyone else's votes. The Republicans have to find a way to appeal to minority voters immediately. Because this problem only gets worse for them in 2016. Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Nevada especially aren't going to be any whiter in 2016 than they are now, if anything they'll be less so. By 2016 or 2020 who know? It's possible that Arizona and Texas might start drifting out of the Republican column as well, or at least become swing states. The cranky white man vote peaked in 2004,

The Republican Party has to evolve or die. But they won't. They're already whining about how awful Romney was. Which okay, that's true, but who else did you have? Ryan? Rubio? Santorum? Please. You have to be able to get through the primaries to go up against Obama. And it's been my theory since 2008 that it is no longer possible for a candidate capable of winning the general election to get through those Republican primaries. Their primary voters force the candidates to pledge allegiance to the dumbest crap anyone's ever heard of. So, that's myth number one - they didn't lose because Romney was so awful, they lost because it's impossible for a good candidate to survive the process.

Myth two - The Media did it. Cons love to whine about the liberal media, but here's a fun thought experiment. Imagine that the Democratic Candidate did even half of the stupid shit Romney did this year. Buried. No chance. Kerry going wind-surfing was enough to do him in for Christ's sake. The entire career of George W. Bush is the ultimate argument against this media bias argument. The guy, honestly, is kind of a chump. Basically he's Mitt Romney with a light coating of frat boy charm, if Mitt Romney had driven Bain Capital into the ground and then fucked up two more equity companies on top of that, then quit drinking and went into politics. In no functioning democracy with a media that's even trying to be fair does George W. Bush beat Al Gore for anything. Al Gore was, okay, a boring technocrat without Bill Clinton's verve and charisma. But if George Bush was black, he'd be in prison. Because you can't get away with the shit he's gotten away with if you're black. Anyway, I know I won't convince anyone that the media doesn't have a liberal bias, this myth has too much traction. But it IS a myth.

Myth three - Half the country just wants free stuff, and they've sacrificed our freedom to get it. Ugh. Such vile crap. Look, geniuses, don't take my word for this, look it up. Blue states, by and large, are net tax contributors. That is, they contribute more in taxes to the federal government than comes back to them in federal grants, highway money, etc. Got that? They GIVE the federal government more than they get back. And meanwhile most red states, one or two exceptions, suck up federal tax dollars like they're George W. Bush in the 80's and federal tax dollars are cocaine. Everybody get that? Red states, the people that vote Republican, that vote for this ideal of small government and low taxes and all that, the ones that are paying for all the freeloaders - those are the states where federal tax money gets spent! They get back way more federal tax money than they pay. The federal government could be accurately described as a system for transferring money from the blue states, which are mostly rich and have their shit together, to the red states, which are mostly poor as fuck and vote Republican, which is a big reason they stay poor. So, if this were really an issue of the have-nots voting to steal from the haves... the tally of states voting for each party would actually be almost completely reversed.

Myth four - Barack Obama has put together an amazing coalition: but it will only work for him. This one, frankly, is just weird. Maybe Obama 2008 was a cult of personality, but in 2012 he won - well I just spent 8 paragraphs detailing why he won. I see no reason why another candidate couldn't do something similar, especially in a country, that's 4 years less white, especially if the economy is 4 years better. Of course, the cons think Obama's going to crash the economy, but they've thought for the last 4 years. And they were telling us about the Romney landslide up until about 16 hours ago. So, yeah. Even assuming the Repubs find someone to run that isn't an embarrassing Tea Party joke there's no reason not to jump out and start highlighting their flaws (the party platform they'll be stuck with) asap. Combine that with identifying the best states to spend money and an aggressive get out the vote campaign and i see no reason this coalition won't turn out for another Democrat.

Myth five - Keeping the House and Ted Cruz winning prove that conservatives win if they blah-blah-blah. Look, no House race is anything like running a national campaign. Frankly, most House districts are gerrymandered to the point that even Michelle Bachmann can win them. There's X number of districts no Democrat could ever win, by design and Y number of districts no Republican could ever win, by design. Then there's Z number of districts filled with leftover voters that are competitive simply by accident. Not enough die-hard partisans that live in conveniently contiguous areas to give everybody a fool-proof district. And arguing that Ted Cruz proves anything... Ted Cruz is a deep red candidate in a deep red state that managed to close his mouth before he said anything about how rape is God's judgment on sluts or something else completely reprehensible. You could just as easily say Kirsten Gillibrand winning in New York is proof that no conservative can ever win anywhere. Anyway, whatever, this was all probably a waste of time anyway.