A Look At White Souterners And Obama

Obviously, the claim that Barack Obama was born not in Hawaii but in Kenya and thus ineligible to serve as President of the United States is little more than ludicrous, as indicated by this "Certification of Live Birth," supplemented by this announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser of his birth on August 4, 1961.

The birther movement is ripe for entertaining political cartoons, and here is one from Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In the first panel, one of the two white men sitting on a couch says "Obama's not president because he wasn't born in the U.S. He was born in Hawaii,!" to which his companion responds "But Hawaii became a state two years before his birth." In the second panel, the first man replies "All part of the conspiracy...."

An interesting sidelight to this cartoon is the Confederate flag draped on the wall behind the two men. Philadelphia radio talk-show host Michael Smerconish interviewed Luckovich on July 27. After the phone conversation between Smerconish and Luckovich had ended, a caller criticized the presence of the Confederate flag, contending the cartoonist had unfairly impugned white Southerners.

A little fact-checking suggests that this complaint has a little, but limited, validity. An article by Charles Franklin appearing on pollster.com on November 15, 2008, compared by state the percentage of the white vote received by Barack Obama in 2008 with that received by John Kerry in 2004. Obama did better- substantially- among whites than did Kerry in North Carolina and Virginia, equally poorly in Georgia, and worse in Mississippi, Louisiana (with a 10% drop), and in Alabama, where he received only 10% of the white vote, his worst performance in any state.

Citing the substantial increase from 2004 to 2008 in the portion of the white vote for president going Democratic in Indiana, Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota, Franklin observes in "states below 25% African American, the trend line for Obama is above that for Kerry, indicating a general improvement among whites."

Although he emphasizes the role of "the next four years" in determining how whites will vote in the 2012 presidential election, the numbers Franklin found indicate a tendency for whites in southern states, in which the percentage of black residents is quite high, to vote against the Mr. Obama. (This doesn't, of course, mean that racism was the primary motivation.) However, the numbers in the overwhelmingly white states of Kansas, Montana, and North Dakota, as well as the accompanying graph, imply that the tiny white vote in the South for Obama may not reflect something endemic in the southern character, but rather the aforementioned proximity (or something akin) to blacks.

Nevertheless, identification of Southern whites (as reflected in the Confederate flag) with anti-Obama animus is somewhat valid, especially given the artistic license generally, and legitimately, taken by political cartoonists. Causation (i.e., I am a white Southerner and therefore hostile to Obama), however, is harder to demonstrate and begs further analysis. And given the election of the first black President, brought into focus with the flap over Gates/Crowley, research would be not only grist for small-time blogs but would give us a better idea of what happened in 2008, why it happened, and what might happen in the future.