Wilentz's Dubious Honor

As the year comes to a close, Andrew Sullivan has highlighted some of the most outrageously incorrect predictions about Barack Obama’s political fate. Most such remarks came from strong Republican partisans, often at NRO. For instance, this gem from Michael Graham, after the South Carolina primary: “When he is forced to fight, Sen. Obama's inexperience shows. His record, slight as it is, is tough to defend. He's got a glass jaw, and he will fall into the trap of identity politics. In fact, he already has. The ‘could we beat Obama?’ conversation is purely academic. It's over. The Clintons have defeated him already, because he is leaving South Carolina as ‘the black candidate.’ He won't win another state.” (For the record, after the S.C. primary, Obama won 27 states, plus Guam, D.C., Democrats Abroad, and the Virgin Islands.)

Such comments, I suppose, aren’t surprising: after all, Republican partisans had good reason to minimize Obama’s chances, since Hillary Clinton provided a much more inviting target for the GOP. It was distressing, however, to see one of Sullivan’s highlighted comments come not from a GOP partisan but from a prominent scholar—Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. Of Wilentz’s many anti-Obama broadsides, Sullivan selected the following:

This year's primary results show no sign that Obama will reverse this trend should he win the nomination. In West Virginia and Kentucky, as well as Ohio and Pennsylvania, blue collar white voters sent him down to defeat by overwhelming margins. A recent Gallup poll report has argued that claims about Obama's weaknesses among white voters and blue collar voters have been exaggerated - yet its indisputable figures showed Obama running four percentage points below Kerry's anemic support among whites four years ago... Given that Obama's vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.

That prediction, obviously, fell flat, for a variety of reasons. First of all, Obama’s strategy never presumed overwhelming backing from “working-class white voters”; he counted on merely doing well enough with the constituency and allowing other groups (the young, minorities, well-educated and/or suburban voters) to carry him to victory. Second, historical evidence was scarce that white working-class voters preferring one candidate over another in the primary season meant that their votes would be lost if the second candidate won the nomination. In fact, since the origins of the current primary system following the 1968 convention, the only nominee to whom Wilentz’s analysis might have applied was George McGovern in 1972.

A comparison of the PA results from 2000 and 2008 show why Wilentz made Sullivan’s list.

2008:

Obama lost a handful of white working-class counties around Pittsburgh that Al Gore had won in 2000. But he more than compensated for these defeats by reversing Gore’s defeat in Centre County (home of “university town” State College) and by winning the three counties in which Philadelphia’s “affluent white suburbs” were based by 138,000 votes. Gore’s margin had been 25,000.

As the overall total of U.S. political historians continues to plummet, those with a general media voice has also dramatically declined. Apart from Wilentz, I can think of only three U.S. political historians—Alan Brinkley, Julian Zelizer, and Douglas Brinkley—who are widely recognized as public intellectuals. It’s unfortunate, therefore, to see such a prominent historian of American politics make Sullivan’s list.