Supreme Demographics

As Barack Obama, who changed the face of America's executive branch, prepares to name his first Supreme Court justice, speculation focuses as much on demography as it did during his presidential campaign last year.

Does he "have to" name a woman? Will his choice be a Hispanic woman or perhaps a Lesbian? Is political correctness running amok?

Not if you look back at Supreme Court history which, before the nasty Bork confirmation fight in 1987, is widely believed to have been beyond politics in a bipartisan search for the best legal minds available.

When FDR railed at the "nine old men" who blocked New Deal initiatives and made his ill-fated attempt to expand the Court by as many as six members, the only demographic issue was the naming of Jews, to the consternation of Justice James Clark MacReynolds, a Woodrow Wilson appointee and avowed anti-Semite who refused to talk to them or acknowledge their presence.

In those halcyon days, not long after women got the right to vote, the "best legal minds" were to be found almost exclusively in a white Protestant male gene pool that reflected not the diversity that Obama stresses but a minority of Americans that constituted a ruling elite.

Now that those barriers are down, there are heated arguments about which former outsiders have the strongest claim to representation, but when voters put Obama in the White House, they were giving him the power to decide what the redefinition of "best legal minds" should be for the 21st century.

After all the sound and fury die down, he will do just that.

Slicing and Dicing the Electorate

Whatever happened to the Melting Pot? Now we learn that "Barack Obama is faring better than might be expected among Jewish voters, beating John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily general-election matchups and trailing Hillary Clinton only slightly in Jewish Democrats' preferences for the Democratic nomination."

This crucial piece of information tells us what? That Jews don't blame Obama for the anti-Semitic outbursts decades ago by Louis Farrakhan, who is admired by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Is this something we need to know? A wise old editor I worked with used to say about such useless information, "Uninteresting, if true."

As pollsters and political "experts" turn this election year into a demographic nightmare, pinning labels on voters by race, gender, religious affiliation, age, income, education, everything but height and weight, the dominant theme of the campaign coverage has become parsing everything that divides Americans and deciding which politician profits from which.

Obama keeps talking about reaching across those divisions, but the media story line keeps magnifying them. All of this perpetuates the beliefs of Karl Rove et his ilk that the way to win elections is to divide and conquer.

Voters, who have seen how well that worked out for them in the past eight years, may be ready to defy the labels and surprise the experts. Now that would be interesting, if true.

Obama's Binds

He wanted it to be New Politics vs. Old Politics but, as the states dwindle down to a precious few, Barack Obama is being tied in political knots by ancient divisions of race, culture and social class that are being exploited by the Clinton campaign, with some unexpected help from Obama's former spiritual adviser.

You can dress up the differences, as David Brooks does, in new demographic garb, as the educated/less-educated divide, but that only puts a new gloss on the resentment and mistrust that have always fueled have-not hatred of those perceived to be privileged.

Half a century ago, the war hero known as Ike twice defeated the "egghead" Adlai Stevenson, so called because he spoke in coherent sentences. JFK barely beat Nixon, who was born wearing a jacket and tie, but LBJ's disastrous Vietnam war gave the Uriah Heep of presidents new life to act humble and "Bring Us Together" against the voluble Hubert Humphrey and then the cerebral George McGovern.

Ronald Reagan made an art form out of folksy to wipe out Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale and, with an intermission for Bill Clinton's down-home act, we got the man you would like to have a beer with, George Bush, over the wonkish Al Gore and the stiff John Kerry.

So Barrack Obama's dilemma is nothing new in American politics, except for the piquant touch of a self-made man of mixed race being eliticized by a former First Lady and an Admiral's son with a very rich wife.

"You can't beat brains," JFK liked to say, but to get to the White House, you are well-advised to hide them. If he can survive his current ordeal of being bitten by demographic ducks, Obama would bring something to the presidency that hasn't been seen much lately.

After Bush, do we really want another jerk running the country?

The Bushed Generation

Tomorrow's Pennsylvania primary will most likely settle nothing, but there is an outside chance that the results could end it all. If Barack Obama wins by even one vote, it's over.

The slice-and-dice demographics show Hillary Clinton running strong among blue-collar voters, gun owners and bowlers, but there is a less obvious layer of the electorate that could surprise the experts--the voters who were pre-pubescent when George W. Bush took power.

These 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who are either in college or entering the work force into a dismal economy have been registering in large numbers, and despite all the negative ads and campaigning, may find Obama's message of new politics and hope irresistible. He could win the nomination on their disgust with what eight years of the worst presidency in modern times has wrought.

At a rally yesterday, Obama said, "You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain, and all three of us would be better than George Bush.

"But what you have to ask yourself is who has the chance to actually really change things in a fundamental way so that 10 years from now or 20 years from now you can look back and you can say boy we really moved in a new direction and we put the country on a better path."

According to an AP reporter, "The comment threatened to undercut Obama's efforts--and those of the entire Democratic Party--to portray the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting as nothing more than an extension of Bush's unpopular tenure. At the very least, it provides fodder Republicans can use to prop up McCain."

But it may well be that the conventional wisdom of propping up McCain misses the point of this election. Pennsylvania's youngest voters may settle that question tomorrow.

The Pox of Pigeonhole Politics

If Barack Obama has accomplished nothing else in his campaign so far, he has done us all a service by confounding the political consultants and pollsters who slice and dice voters by age, gender, ethnicity, religion, economic status, the population density of where they live and sub-categories thereof.

Unfazed by their spectacular failure in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the identity experts appear regularly after each victory to report confidently on Obama's "progress" with younger women, blue-collar workers, Latinos, etc. to explain his march toward the Democratic nomination.

No turn of events escapes their expert analysis. In a classic gotcha, whatever they predict that turns out to be wrong is simply a new trend to be reported with confident expertise.

All this begs the question, to put it bluntly, of whether they know what they're talking about. One of the heartening aspects of the Obama campaign has been his capacity to reach across the lines that divide voters and tap into hopes that could unite them.

Each success has left Hillary Clinton's strategists scrambling for ways to stop losses among working men, shore up support among younger women, rope in straying independents and woo other perceived segments of society--a process that produces the picture of a campaign running off in all directions.

It's too much to hope that the experts will abandon their pigeonholing of voters. They will most likely respond by discovering a new demographic--true believers in the possibility of change, with subdivisions by age, gender, religion, etc.

White Men Can't Jump?

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are bringing to the fore the most neglected demographic in more than half a century of empowerment of minorities.

In trying to explain why the surge for Obama failed to become a tidal wave on Super Tuesday, the pundits are honing in on the behavior of the largest silent segment of society--white men.

In parsing the results, Adam Nagourney of the New York Times concludes that 2008 has "cleaved the party neatly in two: the Clinton Democrats and the Obama Democrats. Age, race and gender have become the dividing lines; nothing comes close to mattering as much.

"The Obama Democratic Party is made up of younger voters (under 44), blacks, white men (to a more limited extent) and independents...The Clinton Democratic Party is the party of women, older voters, Hispanics and also some white men."

From this point of view, of all the demographic armies marching in lockstep, only white men have failed to jump into the ranks on one side or another and stay there.

According to the Times, "Mr. Obama split the white male vote nationally with Mrs. Clinton, but there was an important geographical disparity there: White men in California voted for Mr. Obama but white men in Southern states like Alabama did not. The question is what white men in Ohio will do next month, during what is shaping up as a critical showdown for Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton."

May an aging member of this indecisive species suggest the trendiness of identity politics is going too far? If there is a split in the Democratic Party, it is more attitudinal than demographic.

Those who see the world as a set of problems to be dissected, analyzed and solved are more likely to be drawn to Mrs. Clinton. Those who believe that hearts are as important as minds in shaping the future may rally around Obama.

There is much to be said for both points of view and, if voters don't let themselves get stampeded into categories, they can make their individual decisions about what matters most to them.

After all these years of Bush mindlessness and heartlessness, they can't go too far wrong.