Writing in his Washington Post column about the air wars among the Democratic hopefuls a couple of days ago, Howard Kurtz quoted former Gore and present Clark operative Chris Lehane trying to explain why his man bypassed Iowa and is concentrating his spending in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arizona:
“This will underscore the fact that Wes Clark is a national candidate,” said spokesman Chris Lehane. Given the sizable proportion of African Americans in South Carolina, Native Americans in Oklahoma and Hispanics in Arizona, he said, “we specifically picked the three states that we believe the press, public and opinion-makers will see as reflective of the country.”
Racial balancing multicultism is such a pervasive mantra among Democrats these days that they don’t realize how funny it sounds to say that a candidate for president decided to concentrate on one state with a lot of blacks, another with a lot of Hispanics, and another with a lot of Native Americans because taken together they are — or rather, the press, public, and “opinion-makers” will view them as — “reflective of the country.”
Increasingly Democratic operatives, consultants, strategists, and candidates view the United States as functionally a confederation of races and ethnicities. Maybe they have rejected the constitutional value of neutral equality, an equality that is blind to race, religion, and national origin, on a far deeper level than anyone has recognized, that what they implicitly prefer is an arrangement more akin to the Articles of Confederation, with the constituent entities being races and ethnicities rather than states.
Your points on the Democrats are well taken, but a more charitable reading of Lehane’s quote is that the Clark campaign sees Iowa and New Hampshire as far less representative of the general electorate than the other three states. The truth is, Iowa and New Hampshire have enjoyed an unfair advantage for years in selecting presidential nominees, due largely to an accident of the calendar and the unwillingness of party leaders to challenge the system.
Skip – I think that is a fair and good point. Even so, it still assumes that representativeness = ethnic mix. Iowa, for example, has many union members, which S.C., Okla., and Ariz. do not. Why then are they representative but Iowa is not?
Of course we know this is nothing more than spin on the part of Clark’s handlers to put the best face on his retreat. Like any good general, he knows to avoid a fight when he is going to lose. Not surprisingly, like other Democrats, he resorts to racial politics at the drop of a hat.
You are spinning his strategy to make it look like it was done for racial reasons. Obviously the Clark team did not imply anything about the racial makeup of those states. Someone has interjected his personal analysis of the racial makeup of those states into the middle of an actual quote in order to associate a Democrat or Democrats in general with a topic that most people detest. It is more likely that South Carolina, Arizona, and Oklahoma are meant to represent three different regions of the United States. That said, Iowa is just as representative as those other states, The Clark team is simply concentrating resources on states that he can win. In 2000 Bush did not do a hell of alot of campaigning in California, and I doubt that it had anything to do with the ethnic makeup of any state
Sherm, you are correct in pointing out that Clark is skipping states he feels he can’t win, but your missing the larger point. Lehane is spinning Clark’s retreat in a fuzzy quasi-multicultural way that liberal politicans get away with for whatever reason. If you remember, Leiberman announced he was skipping Iowa and New Hampshire because he couldnt compete with Kerry and Dean, and the analysis of that announcement was Lieberman was slowly going under. Lieberman is a moderate centrist…coincedence? I dont think so