"Poll: Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama
By RON FOURNIER and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent," responsible for their own troubles.
The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views.
Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.
"There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's only a few bigots," said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.
The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.
The findings suggest that Obama's problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.
The survey also focused on the racial attitudes of independent voters because they are likely to decide the election."
Read The Full Story Here: News.Yahoo.Com
CHRIS LIVE AKA SHAKER SAYS: The findings of this article shouldn't be much of a shock to anyone with half a brain ... lol. Sadly, too many White Democrats are all too willing to cut off their Black nose to spite their White face this election season.
For far too long a majority of Black people have reflexively chosen the Democratic Party without seriously examining that party's views and policies on a whole. Don't get me wrong, I clearly understand why. The GOP (coincidentally the party of Reconstruction) somewhere along the line fostered an ugly and intolerant stance cloaked in the term "conservativism" (NOTE: Surprisingly to some, most Black voters would probably fall into the conservative category as well if it were not for the Republican Party's corrosive co-opting of that brand) towards anyone unlike them and have gone from indifference to downright vitriol with regard to Blacks in particular.
Given such facts concerning the Republican Party, Blacks instinctively choose the lesser of 2 evils. The problem with that choice is that we have never held the Democratic Party accountable to us. The heads of the party are fully aware of our "damned if you do/damned if you don't" political situation and are quite comfortable with such a lopsided arrangement in their favor.
Politically, Black people collectively suffer from low self-esteem. Even on a personal level, we pretty much know what happens to girls with low self-esteem, right? They sell themselves short and expect less and therefore receive less from their partners. Similarly, many of the old guard in the Democratic Party view us with abject condescension. They pity us and can only view us through the cloudy prism of poverty and crime ... we're their pet project. So, they fuck with us and we fuck with them because we BOTH know that we have nowhere else to go politically speaking.
Any such relationship would inevitably encourage resentment in the benefactor - our current political arrangement is no different. Any advancement on the part of Black Americans that is not directly facilitated by Democratic Party heads and/or their special programs is, for some, evidence of us doing just a little bit too much, ya dig? How could you be governed by 1 of the poor unfortunate souls whom you've spent your entire career helping? No Black person is that cool.
Now, none of what I have written thus far is meant to dissuade ANY of my readers from voting for Barack Obama come November 4th. On the contrary, my intention is to galvanize more young voters to become even more active in this immensely important election process because we CANNOT afford to count on the number of registered Democratic voters to directly translate into the number of votes for our next president: Barack Obama. Take nothing for granted. Rock the vote!
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This[your writing] is very good.
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