A Couple of New Race Cards

The Disney Template. An item that "Hannah Montana" had sold out the Houston Rodeo Show within half an hour reminded me about the special power of the Disney Race Template. Building on their television shows, movies like "High School Musical" represent schools as integrated places where the star white basketball player dates a hispanic "genius girl," the head of the "brainiacs" was black and female, and the ending was a black guy finally getting the white drama queen to go out with him. "High School Musical" starts with an integrated premise and become more integrated as the various story lines are worked out. It's a sweet model of fictional reality that a lot of kids take as being the real world. As a result, college students at my almost all-white university can be surprised both at the extent of white racism and surprised that blacks are highly aware and resentful of racism.

John Edwards: The Last Viable White Man in America. There's an interesting anomoly in the latest Newsweek polling about the presidential race. Even though John Edwards is polling at 12-14% among Democrats, Newsweek has him doing better in head to head matchups with John McCain and Rudy Giuliani than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. That John Edwards does well against McCain and Giuliani is evidence for RSI's idea that the Dems could win with a potted plant in 2008. That Edwards does better than Hillary and Obama in the head-to-heads with Republicans even though he trails well behind them among Democrats is interesting because it raises the spectre of gender and race in the presidential race. Where Edwards scores better than the two more popular candidates is among Democrats and Independents. The 5% boost that Edwards has over Obama among Democrats and 4% margin over Obama among independents might be a measure of who is not going to be willing to vote for a black candidate in 2008. The same to a lesser extent with gender in relation to Edwards' 4% margin over Hillary against McCain and 3% against Giuliani. I think that their association with President Bush and the Iraq War is going to eat away at support for McCain and that Giuliani is not a serious candidate. John Edwards might be the last viable white candidate in America.