http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/12/sunday/main4515842.shtml
A Matter of Race
Could Attitudes On Skin Color, Not Issues Still Decide The Presidential Contest? Experts Debate What Voters May Truly Feel
Oct. 12, 2008
When asked if race will affect a voter's decision, some say it is unavoidable, and that there are some voters who ? issues aside ? just aren?t ready to cross that racial divide at the polling booth. (AP)
A look at the young senator from Illinois and his pursuit of the presidency.
(CBS) Could a matter of race decide the Presidential election? Few voters are willing to say so out loud. But what are they thinking in private? Our cover story is reported now by Bill Whitaker:
It's the vexing issue hiding in plain sight.
"I know there are some people who won't vote for me because I'm black, and that's ok," said Democratic candidate Barack Obama.
Even as the economy seems to be in freefall, as Americans grapple with whether to vote for Obama, the first African American presidential nominee, or his Republican opponent, John McCain, it's a decision unavoidably colored by race, whether we like it - whether we admit it - or not.
When asked if race will affect a voter's decision, some say it is unavoidable, and that there are some voters who - issues aside - just aren?t ready to cross that racial divide at the polling booth.
Barack Obama, the son of a white American mother and a black father from Kenya, says his race is not an issue for him.
"I self-identify as African American. That's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed, and I'm proud of it."
But his race is an issue for some Americans.
"I don't want to say I'm prejudiced or anything, but for one, I'm not going to, I don't want to vote for a colored man to be our president," said one voter.
"There are a group of people who will never, ever vote for Barack Obama," said Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor of politics and African American studies at Princeton University, and an Obama supporter.
"On the other extreme there are a group of white voters who are beside themselves with excitement about the idea of being in a multi-racial coalition led by a black candidate,' she said. "Then there is the vast middle. That group of voters are really the people that the Obama campaign is worried about making sure that the strategy is one about policy, about issues, about positions and not about questions of race."
Joe Trippi, a Democratic political consultant and an analyst for CBS News, says that Obama is running to be America's president, "not African-America's president or White-America's president, but everybody's president.
"And any time he gets sidetracked into defending or bringing up race, it doesn't help him."
In fact, race is a political hot potato that burns anyone who gets close. When Hillary Clinton said she more than Obama appealed to "hard-working Americans, white Americans," she was accused of exploiting the racial divide. When Sarah Palin tells her crowds Obama doesn't see America like they do, she says she means he's an elitist. Others hear racial code words.
? as when he is referred to at GOP rallies as "Barack Hussein Obama."
And when Obama said Republicans were trying to make voters afraid of him - remarking that the Democrat "doesn't look like all the other presidents on the dollar bill" - the McCain camp accused him of playing the race card.
Dan Bartlett, former counselor to President George W. Bush, now a CBS News political analyst, says the McCain campaign knows the boundaries.
"They've learned the lesson from the primary process with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton," Bartlett said. "And I think it's a simple lesson, that nothing really good comes out of even going up to the line, so to speak."
"But many whites thought the lines was crossed by the blistering language of Obama's former minister, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright - comments Obama said were not only wrong but divisive.
It forced the Senator from Illinois to tackle race in America head-on, in a speech last March in Philadelphia where he said, " I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union."
But that might be easier said than done.
