August 26, 2008
The Dog That Isn’t Barking
By BOB HERBERT
Dearborn, Mich.
The fun and games may be in Denver, but this year’s presidential election will likely be decided in critical states like Michigan, where many Democratic voters, despite being hammered by a wicked economy, are ambivalent at best about the candidate at the top of their party’s ticket.
You could easily get the impression, through casual conversations, that Michigan will be a cakewalk for Barack Obama. Most people you talk to say that they plan to vote for him. Nearly all working families have been touched by the downturn, which has been longer and more severe here than in most other parts of the nation.
Relatives in different parts of the state are seeing less of one another because of high gasoline prices. Auto industry workers, traumatized by the number of colleagues who have been laid off, worry that they will be the next to go.
The anger at George W. Bush is white-hot.
Margaret Schlack, who is married and the mother of four, talked about the election after attending Sunday services at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church in Livonia, a largely white, working-class suburb of Detroit.
“This area has seen a lot of economic trouble,” she said. “A lot of people are out of work. The housing market is just awful. And I don’t feel that John McCain cares about the average person.”
She said she plans to vote for Mr. Obama.
Jack Davis, an assembler at an auto-parts plant in Grand Rapids, said of Senator Obama: “I don’t care if he’s polka-dot as long as he can get us out of this mess.”
Senator Obama was up by 2 to 7 points in the most recent statewide polls. And he hopes to get a bounce from this week’s convention and his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate.
So what’s the problem for the Obama campaign?
The problem is the dog that isn’t barking.
Talk for more than a few minutes with an Obama supporter in a white middle-class or working-class area and you’ll hear about a friend or relative or co-worker who has a real problem with the candidate. When Jack Davis’s wife, Joan, who also plans to vote for Senator Obama, was asked about Democrats that she knew who would not vote for him, she replied:
“My mother! She’s 85 years old. I’m sorry to say, but she will not vote for him.”
Joseph Costigan, a regional political director for the union, Unite Here, spoke candidly about the tension between the economic distress of working men and women and the persistent, though hard-to-quantify, resistance to Barack Obama’s candidacy.
“We’ve been talking with staff in different parts of the Midwest,” he said, “and we’re all struggling to some extent with the problem of white workers who will not vote for Obama because of his color. There is no question about it. It’s a very powerful thing to get over for some folks.”
Mr. Costigan believes — and hopes — that the number of people holding such views is relatively small, and that Mr. Obama, now with the help of Senator Biden, can surmount that obstacle.
Surmounting it will be tough. Not only do the polls show this to be a close race, but the polls, when it comes to Senator Obama, cannot be trusted. It is frequently the case that a statistically significant percentage of white voters will lie to pollsters — or decline to state their preference — in races in which one candidate is black and the other white.
After many years of watching black candidates run for public office, and paying especially close attention to this year’s Democratic primary race, I’ve developed my own (very arbitrary) rule of thumb regarding the polls in this election:
Take at least two to three points off of Senator Obama’s poll numbers, and assume a substantial edge for Senator McCain in the breakdown of the undecided vote.
Using that formula, Barack Obama is behind in the national election right now.
The race issue can come up in peculiar and jolting ways. After hearing that some union voters had openly wondered about Senator Obama’s possible “demise,” I asked Dan Hammersmith, president of Unite Here Local 748 in Grand Rapids, if workers were really talking about whether Mr. Obama could survive as president.
“That is a concern that I’ve heard, yes,” he said. “But I tell people, ‘Are we supposed to be afraid of that and not go ahead and try to do something different?’ ”
Over the weekend The Detroit Free Press ran a chart showing how people responded when asked if they agreed with the statement that “there are people who want to hurt Barack Obama because of his race and sometimes I fear for his safety.”
Fifty-seven percent agreed.
