Opinion: The end of Wright flight

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist

Wright flight stopped. Barack Obama came out of North Carolina and Indiana with renewed hopes of regentrification. It was another message that America is struggling toward a better self.
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We have had nearly two months of unprecedented media trolling and pollster polling for the damage that Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, did to Obama with white voters. It was unprecedented in the sense that there never has been similar trolling and polling over the associations of white candidates with bigoted religious figures.

It was as if a significant chunk of the media and pollsters were daring America to rear its ugliest head. White voters responded by saying, enough is enough.

To be sure, neither state was Wisconsin, where Obama in his more charmed days won 63 percent of the white male vote and 47 percent of the white female vote. But if Hillary Clinton was hoping for more disturbed white working class voters to flee to her side to change the momentum of the Democratic presidential primaries, it did not happen.

Clinton benefited from Obama's trying times in Pennsylvania, where she won 57 percent of white men and 68 percent of white women. But there was virtually no change in either North Carolina or Indiana, where she respectively won 55 percent and 58 percent of white men and 65 percent and 60 percent of white women.

To Clinton's credit, she quietly seemed to acknowledge this in her speech from Indiana. While pledging to campaign until the last delegate drops, she also said, "We are, in many ways, on the same journey," and, "it is important that as we go forward in this campaign that we recognize we are all on the same team."

Perhaps she recognizes that Wright flight is not worth stoking any further.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.