Minority Reports

After New Hampshire, a hint of racial politics.

by Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker

The brief interregnum between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary may be remembered as a time when it appeared that the magical qualities ascribed to Barack Obama included an ability to suspend all the ordinary rules of politics. Everything about Obama’s Iowa triumph seemed to defy history and shred doubts about his candidacy, including his relative lack of Washington experience. Relying on college kids to win a race normally controlled by geriatrics was thought to be tactical folly. Obama, though, won a majority of voters under thirty, who, according to the Obama campaign, made up nine per cent of the Iowa electorate in 2004 and climbed to twenty-two per cent this year. It was also a tenet of conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton had a tight grip on female voters, and yet Obama beat her by five points among women. Following in the path of Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and Howard Dean, Obama was typed as the candidate of Starbucks liberals (latte having long ago replaced Chardonnay in the iconography of the pundits), someone with little working-class appeal who could never break out of the demographic borders of the young and well educated. But, remarkably, in Iowa he fought Hillary Clinton to a draw among union households and bested John Edwards and Clinton among Independents and Republicans. Furthermore, the results in Iowa seemed to affirm the idea that Obama’s exotic Kansan-Kenyan ancestry was not a liability but an asset, a visual reminder of the kind of transformation he preaches.

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