The Clinton Obama Identity Politics Game

There’s a game that’s a lot of fun right now. Anyone can play, and it involves little more than going about your daily business, being interested in 2008 Presidential race, and taking a cursory look at the exit polls from the completed Democratic primaries and caucuses.

The game works basically like this: visit Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts; your greengrocer or Safeway; your BMW dealer or Jiffy Lube; your dad’s family in Mississippi or your mom’s in Newport, Rhode Island; or just think about any of the places you frequent and try to guess before visiting them if they are Clinton or Obama supporters.

Just one example: As my wife and I drove up to a local coffee roaster this weekend we both exclaimed, without knowing anything about the owner other than his relative youth, and scraggly goatee, “Obama supporter.” And sure enough, before we had even purchased the freshly roasted Panama Boquette, exquisitely laced with civet cat droppings, he was asking if we were supporting Obama. Before we could respond, we espied a white middle-aged woman with steel grey hair stirring in the corner, who momentarily interrupted her inspection of a ceramic coffee cup emblazoned with the roaster’s business name to listen. My wife and I looked knowingly at one another and, sure enough, she put down the cup and came over to announce that…she was a Clinton supporter. A raucous but happy debate followed, with others in the store joining in, until with the help of the black assistant roaster and, you guessed it, Obama supporter, we finally made it back to our car with our coffee.

Although there are many variations—you could make this a drinking game or a travel game—in the end it’s kind of boring because it is so easy. The Democratic primary is all about “identity politics,” as some call it, or voters whose allegiance, almost deterministically, appears to be driven by class, race, and gender, and age all those things that Americans don’t like to talk about, let alone admit frequently drive their decisions and the way they live their lives. It is somewhat ironic given that unity is a major theme of one of the candidates but inevitable, too, with the two Democratic candidates that matter of gender and race would, arise. Class is also playing a role and even the age gap, so demographics, identity politics, whatever you want to call it, is as the exit polls confirm at the front and center of the Democratic race in a way that it never has been before.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Democrats have a diversity and potential pool of voters that the Republicans can only drool over. By the same token, such diversity can be messy and even divisive if one or more blocks of voters feel somehow betrayed. The controversies over the superdelegates and whether to seat the delegates in the Florida and Michigan primaries are two instances of how this could happen. The Democrats cannot afford to let the campaign become divisive, however, and I don’t believe that either Clinton or Obama will permit this to occur.

The bigger issue is whether the Democrats will be able to sustain in the general election the excitement that is apparent at the local coffee shop or hardware store, and if the eventual Democratic nominee, whether Clinton or Obama, can get the kind of turnout they are now seeing in the caucuses and primaries. If they can do this, and if they can turn out blacks and white lunch bucket Democrats, the young and old, and all the other constituencies one or the other of them is getting now the Democratic nominee will win in November—hands down. And If Democrats are ultimately able to energize and unite their diverse constituencies and thrash McCain then the messy, imperfect, and possibly disastrous process they use to select a nominee may even have some vindication.