Michael Barone is getting a fair amount of blog buzz for his article on the demographic breakdown in the Obama-Clinton voting:
[O]verall, the geographic analysis has pointed up to me a divide between Democratic constituenciesâ€â€a divide as stark as that between blacks and Latinos or the old and the youngâ€â€which has not shown up in the exit polls. It’s a division that helps to explain the quite different performances of Obama and Hillary Clinton in general election pairings against John McCain.
***
…That’s the divide between academics and Jacksonians. In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians.
Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.” And he (or she) means it.
Barone goes on (as others have) to compare Obama to Adlai Stevenson:
Like Stevenson, he speaks fluently and often eloquently but does not exude a sense of command. He is an interlocutor, not a fighter.
He then returns to his main theme:
When I first noticed Obama’s weak showings among Appalachians, I chalked them up, as many in the press will be inclined to do, to an antipathy to blacks. But that simply doesn’t hold up. Go back to 1995, and look at the polls that showed that most Americans would support Colin Powell for president. I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of resistance by Jacksonian voters to the Powell candidacy. Rather the contrary, I suspect. He was a warrior, after all, and always exudes a sense of command. Or go back and look at the election returns in 1989 in which Douglas Wilder became the first black governor in our history, in Virginia. Jacksonians in southwest Virginia showed no aversion to Wilder; rather the contrary. Take Buchanan County, which runs along both West Virginia and Kentucky, and which voted 90 percent to 9 percent for Clinton over Obama on February 12. In 1989, it voted 59 percent to 41 percent for Wilder over Republican Marshall Coleman. Overall, Wilder lost what is now the Ninth Congressional District (long known as the Fighting Ninth) by a 53 percent-to-47 percent margin. But that is far less than the 59 percent-to-39 percent margin by which George W. Bush beat John Kerry in the district in November 2004 or the 65 percent-to-33 percent margin by which Clinton beat Obama there in February 2008. Jacksonians may reject certain kinds of candidates, but not because they’re black. A black candidate who will join them in fighting against attacks on their family or their country is all right with them.
TNR’s Jonathan Chait is having none of this, natch. In Chait’s view, it is all about race – and he has the Pew poll showing that white Dems unfavorable to Obama are also more likely to disapprove of interracial dating and immigration to make his point. Indeed, Chait questions “if Barone was unaware of the finding, or chose to ignore it because it would complicate his attempts to glorify the virtuous Real Americans who reject Obama.” The same Pew poll also finds that white Dems unfavorable to Obama are also more likely to believe that we should fight for the US, right or wrong — a finding that supports Barone’s view about Jacksonians, but which Chait most deliberately ignores.
Perhaps more interesting is that TNR’s commenters are not exactly lapping up Chait’s codswallop. Commenter lymonl (April 3, 2008 12:51 PM) writes:
Argh, this again!  This poll that conflates being against illegal immigration (which is every bit as much a liberal position as it is a conservative one) and against affirmative action (a murky issue subject to good faith debate) with utter racism, used to smear Clinton supporters as nativist racist trash…
Commenter teplukhin2u (April 3, 2008 1:33 PM) asks:
What took you guys so long to see that Obama’s got a Kerry-Dukakis-Gore smugness/arrogance problem?
***
Please don’t get me wrong on this. I want Obama to succeed, I want Dems to succeed, and I want dear old TNR to succeed.
But for all these to happen, someone on our side has got to start shining a spotlight on that looming iceberg that is the good ship Obama’s inability to connect with ordinary working people who don’t buy into identity politics. Especially those blue-collar non-NPR, non-Nation/TNR/NYT Dems who found Duke and Kerry phony and who aren’t keen on glamorous big talkers with little seniority or battle scars.
And Chait — armed with his whites-only Pew data — certainly does not want explore black attitudes about interracial dating, which have a fair amount to do with the gap between the college-educated and the non-college-educated.  That gap starts looking like the sort of cultural divide Barone identifies.
Johnnie C. thinks it’s all about race, because his world-view is all about race. Naturally, he sees everything through that prism. What a sad man.
If those “interracial dating” numbers aren’t broken down by sex as well (and I can’t find where they are), they’re not telling us anything. Women are more likely to oppose it, and to support female candidates, for reasons that (we are obliged to pretend, but in the specific case of their preferring Hillary to Obama, rightly) are unrelated.
Obama’s failure among “working class whites” of either sex hasn’t much to do with their racism, either. What Barone calls the “academic” identity may be rhetorically anti-elitist (sometimes), but it’s operationally empty except in its opposition to “working class”-ness (of any color) (Barone’s “Jacksonian”-ness, for example). Most people don’t like people who hate them. Just because they’re broke doesn’t mean they can’t tell who that is.
(Hillary disdains them too, yes, but not so much so that that disdain is her very self. It is Obama’s, and his supporters’.)
my friend D.Larison thinks Barone is full of shit
…and has zero to say about the specific examples, like the Doug Wilder numbers quoted in my post. Shocka.
well, I did not say my friend is perfect
Barone’s discussion of the topic this afternoon nearly caused Hannity to swallow his tongue. The comment went something like, with regard to Jacksonians, “if you mess with their family or their country they’ll kill you”.
I think this should be particularly worrying to Obama. In my experience, academics are so out of touch with almost every other group in America, that if they align with a candidate, it’s got to be a harbinger of abject failure.
Obama? Please.
What am I, some schmuck? This you try to pull? I find your pathetic Cinderella, out-of-nowhere puppet-candidate insulting, quite frankly.
Don’t piss me off.
(/walken)
“In my experience, academics are so out of touch with almost every other group in America, that if they align with a candidate, it’s got to be a harbinger of abject failure.”
Barone could have saved millions and millions of innocent baby pixels had he just used your formulation, Cowboy.
Stevenson – ’52
Stevenson – ’56
Humphrey – ’68
McGovern – ’72
Mondale – ’84
Dukakis – ’88
Gore – ’00
Kerry – ’04
Humphrey and especially Gore did not carry as much “intellectual weight” in the glassy eyes of academia as did their beloved Stevenson but every name on that list had many champions on campus – all wallowing in subtlety and nuance. They despised Truman and Johnson and they didn’t care too much for Carter, he was a tad too Baptisty for ’em. Kennedy and Clinton are the only Presidents elected since FDR who had wide support from our faux intelligentsia.
BHO ain’t gonna make the cut in November – to Dean’s delight as he prepares to lose on his own in ’12.
Psycho has a substantial corner of it, but there’s more.
The “Jacksonian” idea is a useful metaphor, but it is a metaphor, and like all metaphors goes all thin and manky when stretched too far. What’s really going on is behaviors.
Western European civilization (“the white race”) has one and only one thing going for it that is not fully possessed by every other ethnic group in existence: a procedure, a set of behaviors. We aren’t bigger, stronger, meaner, faster or smarter than anybody else — in fact, the procedures we use are arguably the result of being stupider than anybody else, and thereby making bigger mistakes faster. If we have seen farther than others, it is because we stand on an enormous pile of the corpses of people who screwed the pooch.
Listing those behaviors would be tedious, and it’s unnecessary because we have an admirably succinct summary available: “acting white”. People who exhibit those behaviors are, as a rule, successful, more or less in proportion to the degree to which they do so. People who do not “act white” are, in general, somewhat-to-very-much less successful, and, again, the lack of success is reasonably proportional to the deviations.
So down at the core there’s a nubbin of truth: yes, the way Condoleeza Rice (e.g.) got where she is is by “acting white”. The thing about it is, the same thing is true of George Bush (either one), Dick Cheney, and Bill Gates. And no, it isn’t “natural”. It involves forgoing a lot of things that feel good or are fun. It’s another case of newbies thinking they invented the wheel. Hip-hop and jive-talk and bling all you want, you won’t come close to what my Frankish and Celtic and (especially) Germanic ancestors got up to. An H. Beam Piper character describes Versailles: “If Al Capone had seen it, he’d have gone back to Chicago and ordered up one twice as big, because he couldn’t possibly get one twice as flashy or in twice as bad taste.”
Now the interesting thing about “acting white”, and one that even a lot of (putatively) white people miss, is that any number can play. It isn’t a contest, or, at least, it isn’t a contest with one another — somebody else can start “acting white” without costing the others who are already doing so a single thing. In fact, it works the other way. Two people (social groups, ethnicities, nations) “acting white” get richer, individually and together, than either one alone, because the fundamental notion down at the bottom of the idea is cooperation.
So behaviors other than “acting white” are offensive in three ways: First, teaching people that they can’t “act white” and be socially acceptable is teaching them to fail. Second, attempting to claim the benefits — increased prosperity, better health, more power — without having to conform, without having to give up the fun and free sex — is cheating. And third, refusing to join reduces everybody else’s prosperity, first by soaking up the fruits of labor without returning any benefit and second by failing to join the synergistic system that makes us all rich. It ain’t gonna get any better as long as the present set of elite ideals remains in place.
Regards,
Ric
The Democrats-are-egghead-traitors genre of demographic analysis always contains massive analytic flaws says Jonathan Chait, a lot stupidly, which is really just not right cause he probably has a much better quality of life than a lot of people much less dumb than he. But fundamental issues of fairness aside, maybe Jonathan would like to play a little game. This is a game called But Is There A PATTERN????… I made it up all by myself. Here’s how you play…
Go to opensecrets.org here.
Put “University” in the blank what says “Employer.”
Fetch the results for each candidate.
McCain
Clinton
Obama
Can you spot the pattern before Jonathan?? I bet you can. Go get ’em, tiger.
Teh Messiah results:
Heh. Nicely done, ‘feets. That’s update worthy, i think.
– DIPLOMIST!!!!111eleventyone!!
BHO ain’t gonna make the cut in November – to Dean’s delight as he prepares to lose on his own in ‘12.
first time I heard that….not with the Clinton mob still in command.
[…] vote margin over Barack Obama.  The downscale white vote in the Appalachians (discussed here yesterday) plays a big part in this analysis. Our old pal Puerto Rico also reappears as a potentially major […]
Barone’s analysis is interesting, and kind of mirrored what I was thinking.
What I found most interesting were the comments. The commenters who disagreed with Barone’s analysis for the most part did not attack his work and show where it was incorrect, they attacked him. I think that is pretty good evidence that his conclusions are going to hold up.
One thing that needs to be emphasized in his analysis of ‘Jacksonians’ or working class white voters. These people form the core of the private sector unions and are a power, though a diminishing one, in the Democratic Party. The primaries that took place before the Rev. Wright incidents are no longer as predictive as they were. This particular bloc in the Democratic Party is very patriotic, and the ‘G- D- America’ is going to alienate them, no matter who their leadership endorses. An anecdote – my father is a retired teacher and I spoke with him the other night. He will not vote for Obama because of that and he is a staunch Democrat.
This whole thing has done more damage then the primaries show, it has caused damage amongst core, reliable voting blocs. If Sen. Obama wins the nomination the Democrats are going to rue the day they did not vet him properly and the day they decided to turn a blind eye to the Rev. Wrights.
– I have this theory, albeit untested, that goes: “Theres this invisible bloc of voters withing the mass of the electorate that, aside from absolutely any and all aspect of political/moral/human/civil/religious/physical characteristic, really hate it when someone calls them a “murdering genocidal racist pig”.
– Peoples, theys funny that way, and they don’t give a fuck about the “why”.
– I have this theory, albeit untested, that goes: “Theres this invisible bloc of voters withing the mass of the electorate that, aside from absolutely any and all aspect of political/moral/human/civil/religious/physical characteristic, really hate it when someone calls them a “murdering genocidal racist pigâ€Â.
That would seem to be a big turn off for some people, sure.
[…] of Clinton’s support in Pennsylvania is the same type of voter who would rather vote for Doug Wilder than John F. Kerry, which does not register with Mitchell. In this cycle, Clinton has now won white men in 12 states […]
[…] US policies around the world, while only 28% say it about protesting US policies. Call it our Jacksonian streak. (I add for our more progressive visitors that such poll results does not mean that such […]