Richard D. Kahlenberg: Barack Obama and Affirmative Action
[Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action.]
Even as Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee last Tuesday, his continuing failure to win white working-class voters clouds his prospects for November. The inability to connect with noncollege educated whites also undercuts his claim to being a truly transformative candidate — a Robert F. Kennedy figure — who could significantly change the direction of the country. In the fall campaign, however, Obama’s suggestion that he may be ready to change the focus of affirmative action policies in higher education — away from race to economic class — could prove pivotal in his efforts to reach working-class whites, and revive the great hopes of Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy.
Affirmative action is a highly charged issue, which most politicians stay away from. But nothing could carry more potent symbolic value with Reagan Democrats than for Obama to end the Democratic Party’s 40 years of support for racial preferences and to argue, instead, for preferences — in college admissions and elsewhere — based on economic status. Obama needs to do something dramatic. Right now, while people inside and outside the Obama campaign are making the RFK comparison, working-class whites aren’t buying it. The results in Tuesday’s Indiana primary are particularly poignant. Obama won handily among black Hoosiers, but lost the non-college educated white vote to Hillary Clinton by 66-34 percent. Forty years earlier, by contrast, Kennedy astonished observers by forging a coalition of blacks and working class whites, the likes of which we have rarely seen since then.
On May 6, 1968, the day before the Indiana primary, Kennedy participated in an iconic motorcade through industrial Lake County, with black mayor Richard Hatcher sitting on one side of Kennedy and boxer Tony Zale, the native son hero of Gary’s Slavic steelworkers on the other. On primary election day, running against Eugene McCarthy and a stand in for Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy
swept the black vote but also white working-class wards which four years earlier had supported Alabama Governor George Wallace’s presidential bid. Author Robert Coles told Kennedy, “There is something going on here that has to do with real class politics.”
Of course, Obama’s skin color may have made it more difficult for him to attract these voters than it had been for Kennedy. But in some ways RFK had it harder: The May 1968 primary came on the heels of widespread urban rioting spawned by Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April. Blue
collar whites and blacks were at each others throats, and Kennedy was the one national politician most closely associated with black America....
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
Even as Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee last Tuesday, his continuing failure to win white working-class voters clouds his prospects for November. The inability to connect with noncollege educated whites also undercuts his claim to being a truly transformative candidate — a Robert F. Kennedy figure — who could significantly change the direction of the country. In the fall campaign, however, Obama’s suggestion that he may be ready to change the focus of affirmative action policies in higher education — away from race to economic class — could prove pivotal in his efforts to reach working-class whites, and revive the great hopes of Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy.
Affirmative action is a highly charged issue, which most politicians stay away from. But nothing could carry more potent symbolic value with Reagan Democrats than for Obama to end the Democratic Party’s 40 years of support for racial preferences and to argue, instead, for preferences — in college admissions and elsewhere — based on economic status. Obama needs to do something dramatic. Right now, while people inside and outside the Obama campaign are making the RFK comparison, working-class whites aren’t buying it. The results in Tuesday’s Indiana primary are particularly poignant. Obama won handily among black Hoosiers, but lost the non-college educated white vote to Hillary Clinton by 66-34 percent. Forty years earlier, by contrast, Kennedy astonished observers by forging a coalition of blacks and working class whites, the likes of which we have rarely seen since then.
On May 6, 1968, the day before the Indiana primary, Kennedy participated in an iconic motorcade through industrial Lake County, with black mayor Richard Hatcher sitting on one side of Kennedy and boxer Tony Zale, the native son hero of Gary’s Slavic steelworkers on the other. On primary election day, running against Eugene McCarthy and a stand in for Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy
swept the black vote but also white working-class wards which four years earlier had supported Alabama Governor George Wallace’s presidential bid. Author Robert Coles told Kennedy, “There is something going on here that has to do with real class politics.”
Of course, Obama’s skin color may have made it more difficult for him to attract these voters than it had been for Kennedy. But in some ways RFK had it harder: The May 1968 primary came on the heels of widespread urban rioting spawned by Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April. Blue
collar whites and blacks were at each others throats, and Kennedy was the one national politician most closely associated with black America....
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