it's the issues, stupid

http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/546470.html

Issues, not race, hurt Obama in Kentucky
By Leland Conway
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I've already had to address this issue, but it keeps coming up and I can't sit idly by.

Mainstream pundits and well-known liberal Kentucky columnists are again accusing our state of racism in the presidential election.

Their evidence: Barack Obama trails John McCain by 18 percent in the polls. That's it. That's all they've got. Obama trails in the polls, so we must all be racists.

Those who make this dangerous assertion are using the wide gap in the state polls as their premise. If you have ever been accused of racism, you know how horrible an accusation it is. It's a game-ending political chess move. Those who can be successfully branded with this image can have their entire careers ruined.

Racism is a terrible and insideous thing and just the insinuation can be devastating.

These allegations against us are so serious that it has attracted international attention. Twice in the last few months, I've been invited to go on the BBC in London, England, to discuss the apparent bias of our state. I've vigorously defended us to the world in both cases, but one man's opinion is not enough to assuage the predominant viewpoint.

Accusing Kentucky of racism has been based purely on broad assumptions and subjective speculation about poll numbers and with no regard for facts. These assumptions are not only ironic, since racism actually is based on broad assumptions about particular groups of people, but they are also intellectually lazy.

What our accusers overlook, perhaps purposely, is that you don't have to go far back in history to discover that Kentucky has a history of voting heavily for conservatives in presidential elections. With the exception of Bill Clinton, we've voted overwhelmingly Republican in every election since Jimmy Carter.

The intellectual lethargy of our left-wing accusers is proven by a quick study of the 2000 and 2004 elections, in which we find that the results for the Democratic candidate were roughly equivalent to current poll numbers.

In Kentucky, McCain leads Obama by 18 percent. But in the 2000 election, George Bush won 57 percent of the vote, Al Gore 41 percent and Ralph Nader 2 percent. That's a 16-point advantage. Even more interesting, in 2004, Bush beat John Kerry by 20 points, 60 percent to 40 percent.

Using the same logic as our accusers, we could actually conclude that Kentucky is even more ready for a black president than we were for Kerry.

That statement is absurd because our poll numbers simply aren't about Obama's race. People choose to vote for candidates for a variety of reasons, but the overwhelming majority of the time, their decisions are based on issues. While there will be a few idiots who actually do harbor racial feelings against Obama, I am sure that you can also find some crazy loon who's not going to vote for McCain because his name sounds Irish.

There is another important aspect of this failed logic that must be considered. Many national polls tout that Obama is pulling in more than 90 percent of the black vote. How do these same pollsters who accuse Kentucky of racism explain those numbers? Would they dare to assume that such an overwhelming level of support from one particular voting group is racist?

The truth is, while Kentucky is a majority Democratic state — Democrats outnumber Republicans 1.5 to 1 — we're still primarily conservative in our ideology. Conservativism is something that Obama clearly cannot claim for himself. Rather than accuse Kentucky of racism because Obama trails in the polls, it would be fairer to assume that we simply don't like his politics.