I canvassed a bunch of black and mixed neighborhoods yesterday, and while I found a number of Hillary votes, this is meaningless because I don't know anything about the geography of the space or the lists that were cut. What you see above was the crowd at the final Clinton rally, which was about 90% white and only about two thirds full in the convention center. Hillary herself was in fine spirits, and I didn't see the same signs of organizational depression that I saw in Iowa. They probably think they are going to get second, but feel well-positioned going forward.
While white, it's not like the crowd were a bunch of bigots. When Clinton discussed the magnitude of the election, in terms of having a son of the South, a black man, and a woman running for office, people cheered riotously.
Mostly I was struck once again by the discontinuity of Clinton's speech and the prattle in the news media. She talked of solutions, of a laundry list of problems she really wanted to tackle, with very little about identity and very little about meta-politics (in contrast to Obama). There's no new politics here, just hard work. If there was an overall message, it was, if you loved the 1990s, you'll like my Presidency, though the mess we have to clean up is slightly bigger so we have more chores to do. There were several retired higher echelon military in the audience, which she repeatedly singled out for praise. Retired Generals and Admirals really do love her, and her mantra of working hard, governing with experience, and restoring American mystique to what it was resonates with people who see life through a competitive bureaucracy instead of the free-form floating cosmopolitan internet-ty organizer world of Obama. That actually scares and angers them quite deeply.
There's one other point to note. While the blogosphere and the media have parallel conversations about race, identity, electability, etc, it's not like these things don't matter to voters. Voters are parroting these phrases, discussing who can win, who has more experience, who can bring change, who can attract independents and Republicans, etc. When you talk to low information voters, they tell you these things that started with Brian Williams, only it often feels like they are a foreigner learning English. It doesn't make sense but it has an impact. So since this is considered an incredibly hard fought and dirty campaign in the press even though it's not, that's how voters will perceive it.
 Anyway, those are my observations on the night before the primary. I think Obama's going to take it by a wide margin, and Edwards and Clinton are going to split the white vote. There is a slight chance that Edwards could collapse a la Nevada, but I think that's unlikely. Obama's people want this one and have done the work.
If you want to see more photos from the rally and/or pictures from a gay bar drag show in Charleston, why here you go. Incidentally, there was a strange sort of power in being straight guy in a gay bar. I'm not a bar type of person, but for some reason there were lots of attractive girls there who kept hitting on me. Well they would do that until asking if I wanted to meet their friend 'Mike'. It was like having a super power that misfired at the last second.
More soon.
Todd Beeton has a good rundown of the state of the polling and conventional wisdom in the race. |
