Sonny pushes back against the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s insta-infamous recognition of the race factor:

But if we can step away from heated racial rhetoric for a second, we should probably ask ourselves a question: What if she’s right? It’s true that no Democrat can win the presidency without getting a large portion of the black vote…but a large portion of the black vote isn’t enough. (See: Al Gore and John Kerry.) And since she’s going to win the black vote anyway (unless Andrew and Jonathan really think they’ll head to the GOP or sit out in larger numbers than usual), isn’t it important to point out that white antipathy towards Obama cost him votes in Ohio, Texas, and Florida (even though there was no campaigning in FLA yadda yadda yadda)? And, though primary voting doesn’t correlate to general election voting necessarily, if the same thing were to happen in the general that it would be a disaster for the Democrats?

Well, in brief, yes…but. (No point in blogging about it if there isn’t a but.) I think everyone already knows and recognizes that if whites vote for the candidate without any ‘black blood’ during the general election to the same degree they have (and will) in this Democratic primary campaign, Obama will have a difficult task before him. The main problem with Hillary’s comments, from a Democratic perspective, is that they contribute to making that degree as samey as possible. And it won’t necessarily be samey, because white Democratic voters who prefer a white Democrat may (and I bet often don’t) prefer a white Republican, particularly a white Republican who’s offering an almost exact replica of the sitting administration’s policies.

The bottom line is simple: white Democratic voters that voted against Obama because of his race will have to ask themselves which is worse: Obama’s race or Bush’s policies? I don’t think I’m being particularly naive in thinking that the large majority of those voters will punish Bushitude before negritude. The question facing Obama isn’t so much whether a large portion of the black vote is enough, but whether a large portion of the white vote is enough. In an extremely close election, the answer is maybe not. But McCain has yet to demonstrate — at all — that he’s capable of making this an extremely close election. (We still have little idea of how well he can run in a long, rigorous, heavily contested general.) If a certain amount of hypocrisy has always been a part of racism, at this point in time I’m willing to bet that some version of that hypocrisy will lead Democrats who didn’t prefer a less-then-fully-white candidate to vote for him against Bush III anyway.

(Photo problematizing blackness courtesy of Flickr user klbndc.)