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Obama Wars Title: Short Obama coattails for black pols Short Obama coattails for black pols By CHARLES MAHTESIAN | 6/3/10 4:54 AM EDT President Barack Obama may have set something close to an impossible standard for African-American politicians by seizing a political moment and then applying a very specific set of talents to it. Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory was supposed to herald a new era in American politics, one in which the conventional wisdom that there were limits to how far ambitious African-American politicians could expect to go — nationally or statewide — had been demolished. So much for that theory. The stunning defeat suffered by Rep. Artur Davis — one of the brightest stars in a new generation of talented black pols — in Tuesday’s Alabama Democratic gubernatorial primary marked the latest setback in an election year that is proving no better, and perhaps even worse, for African-American candidates who are attempting to ascend to high office. Davis, who was crushed by 62 percent to 38 percent, was preceded in defeat by state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, who finished a distant third in Pennsylvania’s May 18 Democratic gubernatorial primary; Ken Lewis, an attorney who finished third in North Carolina’s May 4 Democratic Senate primary; and Cheryle Jackson, the former president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League, who also came in third in the Feb. 2 Illinois Senate primary. The prospects for most of the remaining statewide black Democratic candidates for governor or Senate aren’t much better. Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker is currently languishing in third place in the governor’s primary, trailing the front-runner, former Gov. Roy Barnes, by close to 60 percentage points, according to the most recent poll. State Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, the likely Democratic nominee in the Georgia Senate race, also trails GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson by a wide margin, according to the most recent polling. In Florida, the story is much the same: Rep. Kendrick Meek, the likely Democratic nominee who gave up a safe House seat to run in the state's open Senate race, also polls a distant third. It’s not just those who are seeking to move up who have hit a wall: Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick is in a reelection dogfight, leading in the three-way race but still well under 50 percent in the polls. Embattled New York Gov. David Paterson, like Patrick his state’s first black governor, has already declined to run for a full term in the fall. The successor to Obama’s Senate seat in Illinois, Democrat Roland Burris, announced long ago that he also would not seek a full term given the almost insurmountable odds he faced as a result of controversy related to his appointment. What nearly all these Democratic candidates have found is that the new political landscape looks a lot like the old one. And while the president’s victory may have served as an inspiration for their candidacies, it’s also serving as a detriment in some cases. In Alabama and Georgia, in addition to historic racial voting patterns, Obama himself is part of the problem. Though his campaign amped up Georgia minority turnout in 2008 and held John McCain to a surprisingly close 52 percent to 47 percent victory, his weak approval ratings there — and in Alabama — are no asset to any Democrat running statewide in 2010. In Pennsylvania, where Obama is considerably more popular, historic hurdles for minority candidates weren’t an overarching issue, according to Williams, the Pennsylvania state senator. He attributed his own third-place primary showing to a late entry into the governor’s race, giving him only 13 weeks to run an abbreviated statewide campaign. One of the takeaways from his own experience, Williams said, is that party insiders in many ways were a harder sell than the primary voters themselves and that traditional party structures aren’t designed to accommodate statewide African-American candidates. “The insiders in the Democratic Party still hold that notion of race. A lot of people who consider themselves liberals or progressives didn’t think an African-American could win,” he said. “There is something to be said about traditional Democratic organization and how it operates — such as the money part.” Yet he also noted a distinct Obama influence in his time on the campaign trail. “I think the Obama era has actually transcended race. Not to say people don’t have biases — of course they exist, they exist in every state,” he said. “The question I got was, ‘Are you an Obama Democrat’ in regard to spending, not in regard to race.” Like Williams, Lewis said he was “encouraged” by the reception he received from voters. But he noted that raising an adequate amount of money proved to be a major problem, as did the role the party played in supporting one of his opponents. “I saw that people were evaluating me based on the assessment of what I had to say and who I was, and that represents an important step forward,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any doubt that it’s possible for an African-American candidate to run and win statewide in North Carolina. We know that.” Still, the biggest problem for those hoping to follow in Obama’s footsteps appears to be that the president set something close to an impossible standard by seizing a political moment and then applying a very specific set of talents to it. He arrived on the scene with almost no political baggage accumulated over the course of a career in state politics, showed a unique skill for assembling a biracial voting coalition and built a groundbreaking campaign infrastructure designed to leverage those strengths. One advantage Obama had that candidates like Meek, Davis and Lewis lacked was the experience of representing and campaigning among majority-white constituencies. He won his Senate seat on the strength of a 66 percent performance among whites in 2004 and carried 93 of 102 counties. After claiming the Democratic nomination in the primary, he even joked about the unlikelihood of his victory in terms he would later revisit during the presidential campaign. “I think it is fair to say that conventional wisdom was we could not win,” he said on primary night. “There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like Barack Obama could ever win a statewide race. Sixteen months later, we are there.” Obama also figured out how to navigate between racial constituencies without damaging his viability among any of them. He carefully cultivated each group and managed to successfully transmit different messages that advanced his cause without alienating any one community. Davis, for his part, failed to find that balance. He alienated key African-American leaders, who viewed him as a political opportunist seeking to curry favor with white voters. It wasn’t just the black establishment that rejected him — in the end, the congressman won just two of the 11 majority-black counties in the state against a white candidate, losing some of them by double-digit margins. “He ran a general election campaign in a primary, and that never works,” said one Democratic strategist tracking the race. “There were multiple tensions against Davis — he deliberately went outside the black establishment throughout the race, and his anti-health-care vote hurt him among white liberal voters. ... You had a black candidate running against a white candidate supported by a lot of black elected officials, and it ultimately wasn’t a tough choice.”
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