Jack and Jill Politics as a great post up on the media's "three fifths of a vote" approach to African-American voters.
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Three Fifths Compromise
26 Jan 2008 06:44 pm
Comments (10)
Drudge's Hillary hate is slowly growing into an Obama mancrush. Why has no one written about this?
Can we please kill this horrible 'three-fifths' meme?
African Americans weren't valued at three fifths of a white person; they were valued at negative three fifths of a white person. After all, the African Americans didn't get to vote, so for each African American counting as three-fifths of a person, the white electorate got an extra three fifths of a person worth of representation - largely to vote against the interests of that African American.
The 'three fifths' was a compromise with Southerners who wanted African Americans to count fully for representation, which would in effect give them negative one vote each rather than negative three fifths of a vote each. It would be closer to the truth (though still wrong) to say that African Americans were valued at two fifths of a person.
By the way, this system is not completely dead: one good example is that there are a lot of people held in rural prisons, unable to vote anyplace, and because of their imprisonment there representation is apportioned to communities that use the resulting power to vote against social services in the prisoners' urban homes.
Lamqpwink:
Because not everyone here is carrying Clinton water. Others are more concerned about the actual campaign tactics that the two campaigns are displaying. Hillary's tactics are Rovian: Attack the other person's strength.
Her opportunistic vote on Iraq: Vote in lock step with President Bush - has turned out to be bad in retrospect, so she started attacking her rivals on the Iraq war via her proxy Bill Clinton. Attacking the opponent's strength to hide their own weakness is right out of the Rove playbook.
But then again, I'm just a idiot with a keyboard who doesn't post on blogs much. I could very well be wrong. In the meantime, I'm going to go surf for some porn.
From my reading, the Jack and Jill post is not criticizing the media, as Matt suggests. Instead, they are criticizing unspecified "progressive blogs", who are apparently unimpressed with Obama's results in South Carolina. (I'm honestly curious which blogs they are referring to, I only read a few blogs but I haven't seen any particular blog that has the attitude that is being described.)
Jack and Jill fail to name a single "progressive" blog guilty of the sins that so concern them. They would be much more effective, not to mention credible, if they named names and cited posts. In fact the only reference to an actual blog that I saw, and it was in the comments, was to Kausfiles. How anyone could mistake that self-absorbed twit for a progressive baffles me.
I feel this realy is not the most righteous anger I've ever seen. African Americans are a demographic that Obama polls extremely well among, although this has not always been the case. South Carolina is an exceptional state in that a huge proportion of voters are African American. Therefore the question is not whether the votes "count" less than white votes, the question is whether the performance can be replicated elsewhere where the demographics are different. The post uses the counterexample of women with Hillary -- but that's ridiculous as there's a roughly equal amount of women in every state and thus a strong showing among women is a sign that she can do well in other states. Similarly a big deal was made of John McCain's win in New Hampshire because it was a primary in which independent and Democrats could vote and thus raised the same question -- can it translate to other states? I don't feel like its somehow inherently treating black voters as 3/5th of a person to point out that Obama does well among a particular demographic and South Carolina, unlike lots of other primary states he has to win, contains a disproportionaly huge number of that demographic. Obama is the only candidate I have donated money to, if it's necessary to say, but I feel like this line of argument doesn't entirely make sense.
Warren-
Don't be a pedant.
The point of bringing up the three-fifth compromise isn't the details but that the American approach to race has often been incompatible with one-person, one-vote democracy. That was the bottom line in the original context and it's the bottom line of the argument here that success among most specific demographics (soccer moms, anyone?) is considered a sign of strength for a candidate but success among African-Americans doesn't really count.
It's a perfectly reasonable metaphor.
the jack&jill post is stupid. they excoriate state sen. robert ford as a self-hating uncle tom because he refused to support obama, for fear that whites wouldn't support him; then, they go on to praise the 'sophistication' of black voters in SC and elsewhere for their initial hesitation towards obama, much of which they attribute to their skepticism that whites would support him enough to make his candidacy realistic. which is it? they then go on (i believe rightly) to denounce the assumption that black voters will blindly vote for any black candidate, and the further assumption that this makes black votes ineffective as a predictor of general election outcomes (and especially of non-black votes). this would have been perfectly adequate to make the point, but they continue with the hysterical, emotional 'three-fifths of a person' bit. it is possible to talk about the real phenomenon of biased or unfair or illogical media analysis of the black electorate without beating the black-victimhood horse into powder; that some liberals haven't learned how to do that yet suggests that they have trouble thinking rationally about race and are hence more susceptible to the identity politics we all supposedly want to move past.
Comments closed February 09, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Thankfully Chris Matthews has been removed from the air this evening. This should ensure that he does not single-handedly bogart Obama's momentum coming out of South Carolina.
Posted by lampwick | January 26, 2008 6:57 PM