Is it already over for Obama?
For everyone who was stirred and moved by Barack Obama’s inspiring and intelligent speech this week — one of the finest of my lifetime — I have bad news. He will not be the next president. He may not even be the Democratic nominee. I pray and hope that I’m wrong. But the evidence is not good.
Why? Maybe it will be because, as Matt Bai pointed out in the New York Times Magazine, Obama only wins urban areas with concentrated black voters and states with few blacks — not enough for an electoral majority. He loses in the critical places with real (segregated) diversity, such as Ohio:
What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other
races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually
makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.
The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are
filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of
their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social
friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining
opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage
payments.
Maybe it will be because Hillary Clinton has shown she will destroy the party rather than lose the nomination. Maybe it will be because Obama is such a threat to the community of interests that wants things to stay as they are (no need for conspiracy theories).
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