By GROMER JEFFERS Jr. — The Dallas Morning News

Blacks worry about polls vs. reality in Obama campaign

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – The prospect that Barack Obama is primed to be the nation’s first black president has black voters giddy.

But the better the news gets for Mr. Obama, with bigger leads in polls the closer Election Day draws, the more they fear it’s too good to be true. It’s especially so in the South, where a history of oppression, voter suppression and near electoral victories make blacks more skeptical than most.

“Every day I watch the polls and get excited because I know Barack Obama is going to win the whole thing,” said Corgins Banner, a 32-year-old Charlotte man who works for a bank. “Then it hits me. Something is going to happen. They are going to find a way to stop him.”

The long-running campaign has taken its emotional toll on some blacks who are jubilant one moment and fearful the next, and the mixed feelings were evident in interviews conducted last week.

Many simply don’t believe white voters are telling pollsters the truth about whom they’ll back, though recent elections involving high-profile black candidates, including Mr. Obama’s own primaries this year, suggest polls are fairly accurate. Some voters also suspect something more sinister – malfeasance in the counting of votes come Election Day.

“Racism is still alive and well in this country,” said Washington-based Democratic consultant Ray Strother, who contends that polls don’t reflect some white voters’ reluctance to back a black candidate. “There will be people who go into the voting booth intending to vote for Obama but won’t be able to do it.”

The uneasiness hasn’t shaken black voters’ resolve. Their backing was crucial to him winning several early primaries, and a strong black turnout is expected to boost Mr. Obama in battleground states, including North Carolina.

“He’s so close, and I want to believe he’s going to do it,” said Amber Hinton, a 20-year-old college student from Charlotte. “But it’s hard for me to believe that it’s going to happen. I don’t think America is going to let him win.” … [MORE]

Popularity: 4% [?]

American politics is tribal.

Not in the sense of Kikuyu and Luo and Kalenjin and Kamba and all our competing ethnic groups, but racial and ethnic components do account for the differences in this richly diverse country.

At the most basic level in the nation of 305.3 million people, it is Black and White. Obama Versus McCain.

Then there are the Hispanics, a sizebable group with about 14 per cent of the population compared to about 13.3 per cent that is black.

There are the Asians, who are a distinct minority at five per cent, and the largely forgotten and ignored Native Americans, who make up about 1.5 per cent of the population.

Among the whites, things get very complicated, depending on how people chose to classify themselves in the census.

There are the majority White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. There are Catholics. There are Hispanic whites.

There are religious or ethnic groups like the Jews; and there are the various white ethnicities – Italian, Greek, German, Dutch, Irish and many more that went into the original melting pot.

Within the white community, for instance, political pollsters look not just at the above distinctions but also at sub-genres like education, sexual orientation, region, occupation, rural or urban, farming or industrial, new industry (IT) or old industry (mining, motorplants) and so on.

These are the Tribes of America for whose votes Barack Obama and John McCain are competing to win one of the most compelling presidential campaigns in US history.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, the latest stop on a whirlwind tour between last Tuesday’s second presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee and the final debate set for New York on Wednesday.

Before Philadelphia, Mr Obama made several stops in Ohio while his running mate Senator Joe Biden campaigned in Florida, another key state whose electoral vote could determine the outcome of the election.

Republican candidate John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin have been equally busy in the week or so between the two debates, covering, sometimes together and sometimes separately, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio and Winsconsin.

National opinion polls show Mr Obama increasing his lead over Mr McCain, reaching double-digit 11 percentage points — 52 percent to 41 per cent — according to the latest Gallup daily tracking poll at the end of the week.

The margin was mirrored in the latest Newsweek poll. But outside the major national events like the presidential debates, the campaign is being fought at the grassroots level, block by block, town by town and state by state.

   A pro-Obama campaign march in Nashville, Tennessee earlier this month

What matters in the American political system is not the national popular vote, but the state-by-state popular vote which determines the number of electoral votes through which the electoral college elects the president.

The outcome in some states can already be predicted — New York generally votes Democratic — so the candidates are concentrating their efforts on the so-called battleground states where the outcome is still uncertain.

There is no need, for instance, for Mr Obama to spend too much in California where he already commands nearly 54 per cent of the popular vote to Mr McCain’s 39 per cent.

The Republican candidate would not bother too much about the state’s 55 electoral votes because he has little chance of overturning Mr Obama’s majority.

The reverse holds true in another large state like Texas with its 34 electoral votes where Mr McCain holds an unassailable 51 per cent advantage over Mr Obama’s 38 per cent.

So the campaigns are almost over in California and Texas and in a large number of other states where solid red indicates support for the Republican candidate while solid blue shows support for the Democrat.

But then there are the states where the outcome is still too close to call; they are coloured light blue or pink depending which way they lean.

And there are some states where the candidates are virtually tied; they are marked with blue and red checks.

Almost all the polls now indicate that if the certain states for either candidate are counted, Mr Obama has a clear lead.

If he also captures the states leaning strongly towards him — those where he has more than a five per cent margin — then all the key pollsters including Reuters, Newsweek, Zogby, Gallup, give him an unassailable victory over Mr McCain in electoral votes.

Some estimates already give Mr Obama just over the 270 electoral votes needed to secure victory; most give him a clear margin of between 330 and 350 electoral votes compared to Mr McCain’s 190 to 210.

Mr Obama’s tremendous surge is being attributed to the way in which he has steadily eaten into the regional and demographic groups that have been supportive of McCain or of the Republican party in general.

States like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri and quite a few others were just weeks ago solidly for McCain. Now they are seen as leaning towards Mr Obama or are too close to call.

According to the conventional wisdom of electoral demographics, Mr Obama’s key support comes from non-white groups including blacks and Hispanics; the youthful 18-29 age group; those with postgraduate educations; women; the urban poor, mostly black; and groups that are ambivalent towards religion.

Mr McCain’s strengths have been among whites, other than Hispanic; senior citizens over 65 years; the traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) and whites who attend church frequently or for whom religion is important.

On the demographic map, therefore, Mr McCain’s support base has been in the traditional Republican strongholds, the middle and central United States that are largely agricultural bastions of conservatism; while Mr Obama’s support has been in the big cities on the densely populated East and West coasts.

His support among whites has been limited, as described above, to young, modern, well-educated urbanites.

That is what has changed. I was at an Obama campaign march in Nashville, Tennessee, last Tuesday on the same day the two presidential candidates had their second debate.

Nashville is the home of country music.

Tennessee as a whole is a very white and conservative state; guns, church and ranching are the defining characteristics. It is a solid red state where the 11 electoral votes are all but assured for Mr McCain.

But observing the Obama march around Belmont University, one could hardly have believed it.

The participants were mostly white, as would be expected of Nashville. But they were not just the young, educated and modern white generation generally seen to side with Mr Obama.

The chanting crowd included middle-aged to elderly white men and women of the type that instinctively would be fearful of and hostile to the prospects of an Obama presidency.

That is the demographic that Obama is stealing from McCain in states around the country and the one that might secure him victory.

Article — Originally posted in The Daily Nation on 10/11/08

Popularity: 8% [?]

Writes: Mary Beth Marklein

Illegal immigrants face threat of no college

Some states are making it harder for illegal immigrants to attend college by denying in-state tuition benefits or banning undocumented students.

In the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students.

This summer, South Carolina became the first state to bar undocumented students from all public colleges and universities.

North Carolina’s community colleges in May ordered its 58 campuses to stop enrolling undocumented students after the state attorney general said admitting them may violate federal law.

“The new trend is to kick illegal aliens out of college altogether,” says William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, which opposes taxpayer subsidies for undocumented immigrants.

Josh Bernstein of the National Immigration Law Center, an illegal-immigrants advocate, says sweeping anti-immigration bills are “a very serious threat” to the overall illegal population.

Georgia, which barred undocumented students from in-state tuition rates in 2006, enacted laws in May preventing them from receiving state scholarships and certain student loans.

This fall, the University of Arkansas will require students to submit Social Security numbers and proof of residency. In May, Arkansas Department of Higher Education Director Jim Purcell warned that students without documentation “will not be considered as legally enrolled students” when determining an institution’s state funding.

Opponents say students shouldn’t be penalized for their parents’ actions. Helping them is “the right thing to do even if it’s unpopular,” says North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat who introduced a bill that would prevent state institutions from asking about students’ immigration status.

Popularity: 17% [?]

   Jesse Helms - Enlarge Image
No matter how much Republicans try to sanitize Mr. Helms — after his death last week, his legacy will remain that of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Homophobia and Confederate Segregationism.

The former North Carolina Senator was an unyielding champion of the conservative “Bigot” movement.

And he was the only senator to vote against making the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. His lone dissent came only after he conducted a 16-day filibuster against the King holiday, during which Helms took to the Senate floor to decry the assassinated King, a pacifist and beloved civil rights leader, for his “action-oriented Marxism.”

In an opinion piece, columnist DeWayne Wickham asserts that Helms subtly carried the torch of white supremacy during his lifetime:

“The former North Carolina senator seldom displayed the overt, incendiary racial prejudice that Ben Tillman, the turn-of-the-20th century South Carolina demagogue, often spewed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. But in many ways, Helms accepted the torch that Tillman passed to a new generation of white supremacists — and served the same cause with a tad more subtlety.”

While working as a television editorialist in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960, Helms called the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus the “university of Negroes and Communists.” That snideness echoed the ring of Tillman’s condemnation of education for blacks: “When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand,” …wrote Wickham

When President Theodore Roosevelt invited black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901, Tillman was outraged. “The action … will necessitate our killing a thousand “niggers” in the South before they will learn their place again,” the senator said.

Ninety-four years later, as a guest on Larry King Live, Helms was greeted by a caller who thanked him for helping to “keep down the niggers.”

“Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” said Helms, sounding just a bit embarrassed — and a lot like the linear successor to Tillman.

That was “White-Sheet” Jesse Helms — a bigot whose “nobility” is being shamelessly parroted in the air-waves by right-wingers ….who have eagerly been linking his death to July 4th — Independence day!, to smother the ugliness of Mr. Helms’ White-Supremacist past.

What a Joke!

Teddy Partridge of firedoglake.com says:

“….don’t let the Independence Day paeans fool you. Jesse Helms was a bigot, a racist, a homophobe — and a media charlatan. America would be a much worse place if he’d had his way on his many signature issues. Our nation’s birthday is brighter for him not in it.” ….Click here for more

In an Aug. 29, 2001 piece, David Broder, a columnist for the Washington Post states:

“What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.”

“In 1984, when Helms faced his toughest opponent in Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, the late Bill Peterson, one of the most evenhanded reporters I have ever known, summed up what “some said was the meanest Senate campaign in history,” ….says Broder.

“Racial epithets and standing in school doors are no longer fashionable,” Peterson wrote, “but 1984 proved that the ugly politics of race are alive and well. Helms is their master.”

In 1990, locked in a tight race with an African American Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, Helms aired a final-week TV ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while an announcer said, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” Once again, he pulled through.

Jesse Helms’ White Hands AD

That is not a history to be sanitized.

Richard Nixon was one of the first Republicans to recognize Helms’ Racist utility.

From The Nation:

The North Carolinian was welcomed into the GOP by then President Nixon and his southern strategists of the late 1960s and early 1970s because they understood that Helms was skilled at working the fault lines that could turn white fears into Republican votes.

The Republicans are still working those fault-lines. Indeed, some of the people who worked most closely with Helms as he transformed what began as an anti-slavery party into a comfortable retreat for white-backlash voters are now key players in the campaign of John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

“Let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation,” McCain declared in a statement on the death of Helms, to whom he was compared favorably by former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole earlier this year. (Actually, Dole suggested that McCain was somewhat more conservative than Helms.)

In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Richard Nixon touched the essence of the southern strategy:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Republicans have used this Racist strategy ever since — very effectively. Read more about The Southern Strategy.

Jesse Helms — May You Rot In Peace!

REFERENCES

1. The Republican Party and racism: from the “southern strategy” to Bush
2. Nixon’s Southern strategy — ‘It’s All In the Charts’
3. National Black Republican Association (NBRA) - Democrats are ‘More Racist’

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C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of America through the eyes of a faux documentary takes a look at an America where the South won the Civil War.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Hillary’s Downfall

Popularity: 23% [?]