Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People, Part II

It looks like Hillary Clinton has won over those hard-working white people of West Virginia. With 63 per cent of precincts in, she's beating Obama 65-28.

Jinchi left a strong comment on Pmy Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People" post:

I'll agree that Hillary wasn't being deliberately racist, but you're giving her too much credit here. Hillary's comment was simply a continuation of the foolish Mark Penn strategy of dividing the electorate into finer and finer demographic categories (working class white voters without a college education). It has nothing to do with her view of America as a diverse society.

It is entirely about campaign tactics (who do we focus on, who do we ignore).I think this has been the fundamental flaw of the Clinton campaign and it appears so deeply ingrained in the thinking of her team that they've repeatedly alienated large segments of the Democratic base by publicly discussing it. This is where "insignificant states" and "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock wearing, trust fund babies" comes from. It's where Geraldine Ferraro's nonsensical "luck black man" statement originated. It's why she didn't bother with caucus states (too many party activists) and it's why she gave up completely on black voters. She conceded entire groups forgetting that in the end, all the votes count the same. Obama was able to win by 30, 40, 50 points in key races because she didn't contest them. Meanwhile he kept her wins small by drawing just enough of "her" voters.

There's a lot that I agree with there and the agreement starts with the failure of Hillary's campaign strategy. In my opinion, the failure lay in refusing to take Obama's challenge seriously rather than in Mark Penn's (really Karl Rove's) micro-targeting ideas. Unwilling to believe that Obama could beat them, the Hillary campaign did not put people and money into the caucus states, did not do any campaign planning beyond Feb. 5, and did not commit themselves wholeheartedly to internet campaigning and fund-raising until it was too late. The Hillary campaign both under-estimated Obama's strength and over-estimated the solidity of Hillary's own support. As a result, Hillary's campaign didn't have the infrastructure needed to regain support after her initial poll numbers nose-dived in the wake of her "driver's licenses for illegal immigrants" gaffe.

Actually, I think that micro-targeting is a good idea in many circumstances. In 2004, Rove and the Republicans used micro-targeting as a way to appeal to narrow constituencies in terms of the interests and values of those constituencies as well as the broader themes of the campaign. For example, the Republicans identified "security moms" and "anti-abortion black ministers" as possible Republican voters and targeted their appeals in terms of the interests and values of those groups. Obviously, Rove was selling an ugly mixture of gay bashing, fear mongering, and war mongering. But micro-targeting was a way for the Republicans to add little streams of voters onto their core constituencies.

I don't think Mark Penn was doing much micro-targeting in Rove's sense. He certainly divided up the electorate into smaller and smaller groups as he try to rationalize Hillary defeats, but Penn never tried to add to Hillary's coalition by trying to split off groups that might be seen as Obama constituencies. For example, I don't know why Hillary's campaign didn't work on appealing to "working class African-American voters without a college education" as long as she was making class appeals or why she didn't do more stuff on women in order to broaden her appeal among white women even further. If I were a Hillary consultant, I would have used more black women as surrogates. That kind of additive campaigning would have been "micro-targeting."

Ultimately though, none of this is connected to Hillary's reference to whites as "white Americans." I still see that as taking white people off their racial pedestal and making them (us) just another group of hyphenated Americans. I doubt that Hillary meant the comment to be particularly meaningful but it still resonated as a matter of fact extension of multi-culturalism to white people.

I view that as a very progressive thing.