Why Obama is beating Hillary
IN WINNING Wisconsin, Barack Obama fused yet more fissures in what were supposed to be his fault lines.
Wisconsin and Hawaii now give Obama a 24-state to 11-state lead on Hillary Clinton, not including Florida and Michigan, where Clinton won uncontested elections and whose delegates currently do not count because their states leapfrogged the Democratic Party primary schedule. But right up to Wisconsin, questions persisted as to whether this was, to borrow from Bill Clinton, a fairy tale.
Sure, Obama won vastly white states in the heartland. Ah, but those were just caucuses (with Hillary Clinton preferring not to explain why her own voters were not "fired up and ready to go"). Sure, Obama won the primary states of Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina, but that was because of the black vote, as husband Bill Clinton, the former president, patronizingly pooh-poohed.
Last week, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Hillary Clinton supporter and host to what he hopes will be a critical comeback state, along with Texas and Ohio, echoed Bill Clinton by musing to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate."
Obama won Wisconsin 58 percent to 41 percent. This was a full primary. It was an open primary to be sure, and 37 percent of the voters in the Democratic primary were either independents or Republicans, according to the exit polls. Obama beat Clinton by 7 percentage points among Democrats, 44 percentage points among independents, and 31 percentage points among Republicans.
Whatever racists are out there in 90-percent white Wisconsin, it ultimately did not matter. In the fall, Clinton led in the polls in Wisconsin by 18 to 22 percentage points. On election day, Obama won the white vote by 9 percentage points. The Milwaukee Journal reported that Obama beat Clinton in Latino wards in Milwaukee. Up to now, Clinton had earned far more solid support among Latinos than Obama.
There was still a gender gap in Wisconsin, with Obama getting 63 percent of the white male vote and 47 percent of the white female vote. But Obama's share of the white women's vote, even in losing it to Clinton, reflects a major change from Super Tuesday, when he received only 34 percent of it in Massachusetts and 36 percent of it in California.
In other demographics that take a media backseat to race and gender, but play important undercurrents, Obama won every age group under 65, every income group, all categories of churchgoers, and whether or not voters held college degrees.
In perhaps the most startling piece of data, Obama not only won voters who considered Iraq their most important issue - his strongest policy suit - but he won by 16 percentage points with those who said the economy is the most important issue, and by even 8 points with those who said that healthcare - Clinton's signature issue - is the most important.
If Clinton trailed even after promising a more universal healthcare policy than Obama, then something is up.
I posit that it has something to do with the way Hillary Clinton won in New Hampshire and was blown out by Obama in South Carolina. Those two events allowed a rot to settle in on her campaign.
It was not just Hillary Clinton's welling up in New Hampshire, and Bill Clinton's racial put-down of Obama in South Carolina. Hillary Clinton has displayed a periodic reliance on white women as her safety net in town halls, saying things like "being the first woman president is a very big change."
That would be no big thing, except that the nation's demographics and racial history dictate that Obama dare not employ a parallel tactic by saying "being the first black president is a very big change." Obama has automatically had to run as a more universal representative of the people, with one fruit being his current 10-state streak.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton periodically pops up, subtly or spectacularly burning bridges, whining in New Hampshire that he cannot make Clinton "younger, taller, male," or moaning in South Carolina that solely because of race, "That's why people tell me Hillary doesn't have a chance here."
The Obama people have never moaned once to the whitest of states that, because of race, he did not have a chance of winning there.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
