Running Away From Race
Posted on April 24, 2008 at 11:52 amDouglas Wilder, the first elected African American Governor, thinks that, while racism is certainly not as pervasive as it once was, it is still there and, if Barack Obama is to win the Presidency, he had better come into November with a big lead in the polls.
Wilder is still a believer that what whites tell pollsters they will do in the voting booth and what they actually end up doing in the voting booth are often two very different things.
One thing that Wilder believes Obama has done well to blunt the “Bradley Effect” is to not campaign “as an African American”:
“Obama, by not running as an African- American, has been able to show that race is coincidental to his being,” rather than the centerpiece of his campaign, he said.
The message Obama, 46, sends to voters is “I’m not being dominated by any groups,”’ Wilder said. “That includes African- Americans.”
That was certainly the case early in the campaign, but is it now?
The Jeremiah Wright episode, where Obama confronted the words of his former pastor and gave The Speech on race, forced Obama to do exactly what Wilder is praising him for not doing.
By no means did he emerge out of the episode as an Al Sharpton or a Jesse Jackson but he certainly did embrace the traditional civil rights movement and identify his campaign as an extension of it in ways he had not before.
Poll numbers have, as of yet, rallied back for Obama since the episode but then again, as Wilder says, the polls are often wrong.
Is Barack Obama “running as an African-American”? Can he avoid doing so? Should he even if he could?
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