In a report issued last month, several scholars at the University of California at Berkeley predicted that race-baiting would eventually emerge as a factor in the 2008 presidential campaigns. But most of the historical precedents cited in the report involved cases in which Republican candidates for public office had allegedly used appeals to racism against their Democratic opponents. And David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy who was one of the report’s lead authors, said in an interview with Campaign U. that he did not expect the Democratic candidates to use such tactics against one another in the primaries. “At this point,” he said, “it is unlikely we are going to get serious race-baiting until the election itself.”
Mr. Kirp was unavailable for comment today on the widely publicized, racially charged volleys exchanged by the Clinton and Obama campaigns over the past week. But Joshua A. Green, a doctoral student in Berkeley’s political-science department who helped produce the “Race Bait ’08” report, argues in an interview today that neither the Obama or Clinton campaign has done anything that should be called “race baiting.”
Asked about allegations from Mr. Obama’s supporters that Mrs. Clinton made remarks downplaying the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Jr. role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Mr. Green says she made a simple “verbal gaffe” that was leapt upon by the news media, which “really needed some conflict between these two candidates.”
“What is interesting to me is how quickly the media decided this was race-baiting,” Mr. Green says. Reporters have been so highly sensitized to the potential of race-baiting that “it does not matter if it is race-baiting or not—the candidates are going to be called on this,” which “I actually see as a positive thing.”
Asked about the controversy over apparent allusions to Mr. Obama’s past drug use made by Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, in introducing Mrs. Clinton at a South Carolina campaign event on Sunday, Mr. Green says he did not see the remarks as racist, but just part of the rough-and-tumble of presidential politics. (For his part, Mr. Johnson said he was referring to Mr. Obama’s days as a community organizer, when he said that, while the Clintons were helping black people, “Obama was doing something in the neighborhood. I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.”)
Mr. Green says he did not have enough background to comment on a New Yorker article quoting Sergio Bendixen, a Clinton campaign pollster, as saying part of her appeal to Hispanic voters stems from their not showing “a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” But Mr. Green says there is nothing unusual about a campaign focusing on certain racial or ethnic subsets of the population. “Campaigns are looking to get any edge they can,” he says.
