Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal wherein he rightly attacks the news media for their stupid misreadings about the Democratic Party. But he misses the mark on one very important point.
Emanuel wrote that the primary contests so far have shown that Democratic voters are, in fact, not “a collection of self-interested identity groups.” The proof of that, he says, is in the weeding out of minority candidates such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Julian Castro, none of whom got substantial support from black or Latino voters. By contrast, the two old white men, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, have.
But that Biden and Sanders are the last (white) men standing doesn’t refute the notion that Democrats are “a collection of self-interested identity groups.” It only means that those groups believed they could get what they want regardless of whether the nominee physically looks like them.
There’s a reason Biden entered the race apologizing for being white and his role in the Anita Hill hearings. There’s a reason Michael Bloomberg entered the race apologizing for stop and frisk, which critics have decided is a racist policy. There’s a reason Sanders said at a debate in New Hampshire earlier this year that America “is a racist society from top to bottom.”
As described in my new book, Privileged Victims, this is the ideology that now governs the Democratic Party and animates its voters. It’s called social justice.
True, there is a general misconception among the media that voters want someone who physically looks like them — that black voters, for example, will blindly support a black candidate. If that were true, though, we might have had a President Herman Cain.
As seen in the election of President Barack Obama, it can help motivate voters of a certain race or ethnicity, but the candidate himself has to be selling what those voters actually want.
Sanders and Biden aren’t black or Latino, but they’re offering voters what they want, and they did it better than their former primary rivals.
Emanuel is right to hate the media’s coverage of the Democratic Party. But he clearly doesn’t understand how its voters operate.
