Voting for Race--Just an Issue for Obama?

The beauty (or danger) of Facebook is that your opinions tend to come out to everybody who can see your profile, even those you don't hardly know. For example, I knew a kid back in high school named Callum, who recently posted a link on his page that took me to this segment of the Howard Stern Show that suggests that many black voters support Barack Obama simply because he's black. From this I can make the inference that Callum supports John McCain, even though I've talked to Callum maybe once in the past six years.

In my mind, it warrants contemplation that nowadays you can find out somebody's opinions and persuasions without really talking to them, where before you would probably have to have some sort of extended interaction or correspondence with the person to figure that stuff out. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but it's just food for thought.

But back to the clip from Stern. I'd suggest listening to it because I can't accurately describe how very ironic it really is, but basically one of Stern's correspondents goes into Harlem and asks people (presumably black) who they support, and invariably they all support Obama. The correspondent asks if they support him because of his position on a given issue, but they ascribe John McCain's stance on the issue to Obama. For example, they ask people if they support Obama's pro-life stance (when he's actually pro-abortion) and they all say they agree wholeheartedly. Shockingly, when asked if they thought Obama made a good choice selecting Sarah Palin as his VP (which McCain actually did, obviously), they said they thought it was just fine and she'd be a great VP.

The inference Stern wants to illustrate, of course, is that many black people support Obama simply because he's black, not because of his stance on the issues. I think the clip is hilarious and a particularly biting indictment of the role race is apparently playing playing in the election. Although I would propose a counter-example. Let's say we take a trip down to the deep South, say Alabama, Mississippi, or wherever. Go to some typical white-bread town that could be described as Harlem, only for white people instead of Afro-Americans. Swap the experiment so as to attribute Obama's policies to McCain and ask the white folk if they support McCain on those issues. I'd bet dollars to door nails that the results would be fairly similar to Stern's social experiment.

My point is, despite the fact that most Americans say they would vote for a candidate without considering race, I think it's fair to say that in communities where race is closely identified with the community identity (like Harlem), voters are nevertheless likely to vote along racial lines rather than ideological, and that applies not only to minority groups, but to whites as well. I don't know if Stern brought that up or not, but I think it warrants mentioning to prevent any idea that it's just blacks who do this. If you live or grew up in a community whose identity is based heavily on race, I think it's entirely possible that you'll vote for a candidate based on his race without even bothering to find out about his politics, no matter if you're black, white, brown or purple.

And quite frankly, that's a very unfortunate conclusion.

Voter education would go a long way in eliminating this phenomenon, in my opinion. People should step past broad generalizations about a candidate based on appearance or party support and vote based on issues and, to a lesser extent, character. I invite all who read this to really examine their candidates principles and ideas if you haven't done so already, and see if you still come out on their side.