DEM BUYER’S REMORSE EXISTS BUT OBAMA CAN’T BE DENIED.

By Thomas F. Roeser

Another column for The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly.

Some of these thoughts you have seen before in other pieces I’ve written. On “Buyer’s Remorse,” I’m indebted to Jim Bowman who unearthed the statistical piece from Instapundit and Taylor Marsh I studied and found compelling.


CHICAGO—A surprising thing has happened on the way to the Denver Democratic national convention which will coronate Barack Obama. While it’s nowhere being reported in the so-called “mainstream media”…there are serious signs of what one Democratic vote analyst calls “buyer’s remorse” cropping up in the Democratic party.

Assuredly, barring massive political calamity befalling him, Obama will get the nomination. The Democratic party elders cannot…and will not…risk the certainty that there will be wholesale defections of blacks—the most predictably massive voting bloc ever to serve in any political party—if Obama is denied. Defections that would not just lose it the presidency (Democrats are inured to that possibility having lost it in 2004, 2000, 1988, 1984 and 1980), but would reduce the Democrats to a minority party in city after city by shrinking the black vote to a tiny margin. Consider what it would do to Chicago and Cook county: these areas would revert to a two-party status again, disastrous for politicians who don’t need the presidency ever to root their snouts in the patronage troughs.

For here in the strongest Democratic machine in the nation where one party rule has extended longer than the USSR existed, the first thought now as it has always been is the safety of the Cook county ticket which comes far before any consideration of the presidency. The highly publicized 1960 vote-fraud here that you have heard about was committed: no doubt about that…but was done for a major reason that far transcended the wish to elect John Kennedy president.

It was committed to defeat a Republican state’s attorney (prosecutor) Benjamin Adamowski, who was running for reelection on the pledge to find enough corruption to indict Mayor Richard J. Daley and his cohorts. It was for this reason that Democratic precinct captains flooded the lists with the graveyard vote. (And ever since that day, it has been the wish of many a dying Chicago ward-heeler that he be buried in Cook county so he can remain politically active). But all kidding aside, if blacks get the feeling that their party uses their votes as ballast for Irish, Polish and Hispanic candidates but deny (to them) a perfectly acceptable, quality candidate for president tens of thousands will drop out of the equation overnight…and will take Democrats a generation to woo back.

The blacks would leave in droves. No, not to vote Republican, assuredly-- but drop out of the system by the mega-hundreds of thousands…even millions…forsaking the Democrats up and down the ticket—causing loss of important local offices…especially (horrors!) elected prosecutorial ones… that grease the wheels for machine victories.

The national media have become so entranced with the prospect of a black president that they have not allowed justifiable coverage i.e. Obama’s earlier disqualifications for serious candidacy…identification of Jeremiah Wright as his spiritual godfather and Michelle Obama’s tirades against the white establishment…to overshadow his triumph. Indeed the media have become embittered with Hillary Clinton for staying in the race so long which has cost Obama precious time he could be using to defeat John McCain.

To create an artificial “scandal,” Chicago’s top Obama strategist David Axelrod concocted a perfect media storm to score a remark Hillary made about the value of a lengthened intramural political season lasting until the convention. There are many reasons for the benefit of the Democratic party that she not quit. If Franklin Roosevelt had cashed in his chips in 1932 when things looked bleak for him…as doubts were raised about his paralysis…the party might well have rerun the Irish Catholic Al Smith who failed to carry the then anti-Catholic south and likely would again--or, worse from progressive standpoint, the bourbon-sipping House Speaker John Nance (Cactus Jack) Garner who never met a big business he didn’t love. Everybody knows that it’s true but in cataloging why she should stay in, she mentioned Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. Well, while everybody knows the story, you’d have thought she had tried to douse the eternal flame on the Kennedy tomb high on Arlington’s hill overlooking the city.

Accordingly, she has been screamed-at by most Democratic liberals for supposedly endangering Obama’s life and safety, despite the fact that earlier than any other presidential candidate, he has had phalanxes of Secret Service protection—lasting almost two years now. Everyone from The New York Times to the lowliest Obama volunteer have cried out that she is playing dirty pool. We all know how Bobby Kennedy met his end but to mention it is a cardinal sin (perhaps the time is coming when we dare not mention Lincoln and Ford’s theatre in the same sentence). Moreover, to show how selective is their outrage, none other than fanatical Democrat and emotional Obama supporter Fr. Andrew Greeley wrote several times in this town’s version of the Democratic party newspaper of record, the Sun-Times the prediction that Obama could be slain by a far-right Republican nut.

(Of course, in Greeley’s tortured view of history, far-right nuts have killed all the presidents when in fact none have e.g. Lincoln was killed by southern Democrat John Wilkes Booth, Garfield by a maddened Charles Guiteau who wrote in his diary “his death is a political necessity,” William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, John Kennedy by pro-Communist Lee Harvey Oswald and Robert Kennedy by Palestinian revolutionary Sirhan Sirhan—with assassination attempts on Gerald Ford by Lynette (Squeaky) Fromm, a disciple of mass-murderer Charles Manson and ultra-lefty Sara Jane Moore, but what do historical facts mean to fiction-writer Greeley?).

Now, what of the Democratic rank-and-file “buyer’s remorse” which I have promised to report?



It can easily be seen in the Democratic primary tallies, known to the national media as well but which they refuse to publicize. Thus it has been left to dogged election statistical researcher Paul Lukasiak to catalog with irrefutable analysis and multi-colored charts contained in the blog by Taylor Marsh at www.taylormarsh.comarchives made available by the indispensable Instapundit, an Internet compendium of the best analyses available. Taylor Marsh, incidentally, is no dreamy conservative theorist. She advertises herself as a ready antidote to conservative radio talk show hosts and bloggers and in Lukasiak she has a dogged, emotion-free numbers cruncher.

These are the Lukasiak’s unassailable facts which I have double-checked on my own.

o In almost every demographic category since last February 19, the percentages of Clinton’s support have risen and Obama’s fallen. And this includes Obama’s supposedly impregnable demographic categories such as college-degreed voters, voters with post-graduate degrees and voters whose income is above the national average as drawn from exit polls.

o While John McCain became the inevitable Republican nominee following Super Tuesday he was not the choice of a majority of Republicans but despite doing no hard campaigning at all has won more than 50% in every other primary contest subsequent. But this has been far from the case in Democratic contests even after a media serenade of Obama as the “inevitable” candidate. Clinton not only picked up support Obama lost but the support that before February had gone to other withdrawn Democratic candidates.

Thus as Lukasiak writes which he illustrates with carefully constructed charts—“Once [Democratic] voters realized that Obama would be the nominee [between the February and March to May primaries] his support within most demographic categories declined and declined significantly in most cases. Obama’s support declined overall by 2.3%”. The breakdown: Obama’s support among men declined by 2%; among women declined by 1.2%; among whites declined by 4.8%; among Hispanic-Latinos declined by 3.2%; among white males declined by 6.7%; and among white females declined by 3.6%.

In contrast, in that same time period while Obama’s ultimate nomination victory was being heralded by the “mainstream media,” Clinton’s overall support among Democrats increased by 4.7%. That is almost unduplicated in U. S. political history. Among males her support increased by 6%, among females by 3.1%, among whites by 6.2%, among Hispanic-Latino voters by 2.6%, among white males by 10.8%, among white females by 6%. Writes Lukasiak “Clinton’s support not merely increased on all these categories between February and March-May but she attracted considerable support from voters who had supported other candidates in February” i.e. she gained an extra 2.2% over and above Obama’s loss of support, gained an extra 3.4% of males more than Obama lost, gained an extra 3.4% of white voters and gained an extra 4.1% with white males that Obama lost.

Obama did increase his support among African Americans by 5.4%, among black men by 6.7%, black women by 9.6%. Lukasiak summarizes: “But when that data is weighed in terms of the overall electorate, the impact of those changes is small. Thus Obama’s net increase in support among African American voters represents only 1.8% of the Democratic electorate while Clinton’s net increase in support from white voters represents 8.4% of the Democratic electorate. Clinton’s overall net increase of 6.7% of the primary electorate is a clear sign that `buyer’s remorse’ has set in.”

What happened to spur this buyer’s remorse? Assuredly the Michelle Obama episode where she trumpeted that for the first time in her slightly more than 40 years she could be “proud of America,” because a good number of voters were supporting her husband. Another: Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s vicious race hatred of whitey which Obama first tried to separate from while saying that he could no more disown Wright than he could his white grandma, a position from which he had to speedily dissociate himself as Wright continued to shout that the U.S. government tried to inoculate black children with the AIDS virus to cut down the African American population. A third: Obama’s smug assertion in the confines of a wealthy mega-millionaire’s San Francisco home that whites in West Virginia, in despair over lost jobs and income, “cling” to such bromides as religion, gun owners’ rights and malevolent hatred of those unlike them.

Lukasiak: “Perhaps the group that has shown the most `buyer’s remorse’ is white male Democrats who not only rallied to Clinton after Obama was declared the `inevitable nominee’ but deserted Obama in droves.” Not even Oregon…a state that is much like a well-cultivated, prosperous suburb…where Obama won the white male vote by 2 to 1 (66% to 33%) but won white women by only 2% (49% to 51%)…did he halt Clinton from tallying major gains among white males.” In the February primaries, Obama got a significant 4.6% lead from white males but white male attitudes changed completely in the March through May primaries giving Clinton a 12.9% lead.

Unless Obama can drop the trendy University of Chicago faculty lounge Marxism so popular with liberal elites and reach out to Joe Six-pack in the Democratic party, he will have trouble along the line. Again, there are many, many advantages he has with general voter dissatisfaction with the Bushes, the war, growing inflation and McCain’s not always consistent stands that anger Reagan conservatives. But the fact that the media do not even give a hint of these incontrovertible numbers tells much about the old-line liberal printing press metropolitan daily-network TV biases that are rapidly being overturned by alternate media choices.