Al Giordano and Operation Anti-Chaos: The Narrative on “White Voters” Is Fiction

Since the Pennsylvania primary, I haven’t been able to watch cable news without getting sick to my stomach. Nobody discusses how Hillary’s huge lead shrank to just under 10%. Instead, they question whether or not working-class White voters will vote for a Black candidate, while pointing to Hillary’s barely-eked-out win in PA as evidence that Obama has a problem with this demographic. They also keep repeating that bullshit “elitist” meme, thereby perpetuating it, while asking how Obama is supposed to combat it. Only a few pundits, like Rachel Maddow , are challenging this “conventional wisdom”.

Imagine my happy surprise, then, to find this article by Al Giordano at The Field (h/t Jack and Jill Politics and Huffington Post) (bold mine):

I turn on the TV, read the political columnists (and a significant number of analytically-challenged bloggers, too) and all I hear is a bunch of white folk prattling on about their favorite narrative: “Obama’s losing white voters!”

They’ve swallowed the Clinton racially-obsessed spin, hook, line and sinker. Some, because they are gullible, haven’t an original idea in their little pea brains, and follow the pack of what everybody else is talking about. Others, because they like to toss around knowing falsehoods. Nary a superdelegate can go on Fox News without being berated by an anchorperson screeching (this is pretty close to an exact quote): “But your duty as a superdelegate is to select the most electable and that’s Hillary Clinton!” That these anchorpersons are Republican partisans openly cheering for Senator Clinton is our first clue of the game afoot. One of the major successes of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos is that it has got all the right-wing pundits and reporters marching lockstep behind the effort to give Clinton enough oxygen to keep slashing away at Senator Obama, who remains the prohibitive likely Democratic nominee.

And when Clinton wins state primaries that, because of demographics, she was always going to win – last week, Pennsylvania and next week, Indiana – they then wave that event up like a blood-soaked flag as proof of their narrative: See? See? We told you so! White people won’t vote for Obama!

So imagine my pleasant surprise this morning to see a New York Times columnist, Charles Blow, who did what none of these chattering lunkheads have done. He looked at the hard data of how voters, white and black, view the two Democratic candidates – favorably or negatively? – and how those views have progressed over time. The data is based on multiple CBS-New York Times polls (among the most respected survey outfits among competing pollsters) over two years and more. Check it out:

Look at the damn graphs. You can see that Clinton is in a staggering free-fall among African-American voters, her favorability is down 36 points while 17 percent view her more negatively than before, while Obama’s favorable and negative ratings among whites have paired at five point increases. You can even see the small dip – about two percentage points – in his popularity among whites that can be attributed to the news cycles about his ex-pastor, and see that it has leveled out and is now on a straight horizontal line (meanwhile, Clinton’s numbers among blacks continue on an extreme downward precipice). The greater context is that even including Obama’s slight dip, he’s more popular today among white voters than he ever was prior to February.

Obama’s “White voter problem” is a lie being spread by the MSM, which has a financial interest in seeing the primary go on as long as possible. Seems to me, the REAL question is: How is Hillary supposed to win without the Black vote? Superdelegates, do you really want to find out?