Discriminations

You’d think any presidential candidate wants to win — otherwise, why go to the trouble? — but McCain’s continuing failure to come out forcefully for colorblind equality suggests, at least to me, that he may not (and even if he does want to, that he won’t).

Today, in his highly regarded political newsletter, Stuart Rothenberg writes that the five states that will determine who is the next president are Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, and Michigan.

“Let’s be clear,” he writes,

I’m not suggesting that these will be the five closest states. But together these five states will tell a great deal about whether Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has added to the Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Al Gore states, thereby giving him at least 270 electoral votes, or whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has either held the 2000 and 2004 George W. Bush Electoral College coalition together or been able to offset one or two losses with a previously Democratic state of his own.

Colorado and Virginia make the list because they are the two states mostly likely to switch to Obama that went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.

Early polls show Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, ahead in Colorado and running essentially even with McCain, who will be the GOP standard bearer, in the Old Dominion. Of the two, Colorado would seem to be the more likely Democratic opportunity, and it is not easy to imagine Obama winning Virginia while losing Colorado.

Obama’s potential in both states is in the suburbs, with upscale, white voters who are drawn to the Democratic nominee’s message of change. Both states have seen Democratic gains recently — Democrats won the two states’ last Senate races and made gains in each state’s Legislature in 2006.

If Obama fails to carry either state, his arithmetic gets dicey. Even more important, a pair of McCain victories would suggest that the Republican made substantial gains between June and November — a bad sign for Obama nationally.

I’ve been bugging McCain’s Virginia campaign to come out for colorblind equality for a good while now, and today I continued it, sending the following to State Sen. Chris Saxman, a very good guy who is co-chairman of the campaign in Virginia:

Colorado voters will have to vote on an initiative, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, that would amend the state constitution to prohibit the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment, to any individual based on race, ethnicity, or sex. Identical initiatives passed by very large margins, as you know, in California, Washington, and Michigan.

Obama has opposed all these initiatives, and continues to oppose the current ones. That is, he forthrightly opposes having the state treat everyone without regard to race etc. And McCain? Who knows. He hasn’t said. I don’t think he can continue to get away with dodging this question, which will be on the ballot in Arizona and Nebraska as well as Colorado.

I believe a strong, principled, unequivocal, statement by McCain supporting the core value of colorblind equality would go a long way toward securing victory for him in these crucial states of Colorado, Virginia, and Michigan (which passed its identical initiative with 58% of the vote in 2006, while voting heavily Democratic for everything else.) It’s really a win-win proposition, since it would also strengthen him in virtually every other state as well, except perhaps New York, Calif., and Illinois, and maybe even in those. He’s not going to win any more black votes by refusing to endorse the principle of colorblind equality.

National polls show consistently overwhelming opposition to preferential treatment based on race. If a good and decent Republican strongly supporting colorblind equality, and thus opposing race preferences, can’t win Virginia and Colorado running against an empty-suit liberal Democrat who supports race preferences, then there’s no point in continuing to campaign anywhere....

About the only consolation I can see in McCain failing to come out strongly for colorblind equality is that if he loses he’ll deserve to, and I won’t be as disappointed as I otherwise would be.