Voices In Color

Story Behind The Story: The Clinton Myth

One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning. 



Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency. 



Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet. 



As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives. 



In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.

The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics. 



Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

Red more: Politico

Gallup: Obama Recaptures Edge Over Clinton

Gallup reports: Barack Obama has quickly made up the deficit he faced with Hillary Clinton earlier this week, with the latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update on Democratic presidential nomination preferences showing 48% of Democratic voters favoring Obama and 45% Clinton.

Obama fell behind Clinton on March 14 and stayed there until today. "Obama's campaign clearly suffered in recent days from negative press, mostly centering around his association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright," wrote Gallup analyst Jeff Jones. "But Obama has now edged back ahead of Clinton due to a strong showing for him in Friday night's polling, perhaps in response to the endorsement he received from well-respected New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson."

The Gallup tracking poll is based on interviews with 1,264 Democratic or Democrat-leaning voters March 19-21. Its margin of error is +/-3 percentage points.

A tracking poll by Rasmussen Reports has shown a different trajectory. In that poll, Obama clung to leads of 1 to 5 percentage points all week and fell behind Clinton for the first time today, 46%-44%. Rasmussen calculations are based on four nights of polling, compared to Gallup's three.

Source: USA Today

Chief Of Firm Involved In Breach Is Obama Adviser

The CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates is a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign, a source said Saturday.

John O. Brennan, president and CEO of the Analysis Corp., advises the Illinois Democrat on foreign policy and intelligence issues, the source said.

Brennan briefed the media on behalf of the campaign this month.

The executive is a former senior CIA official and former interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

He contributed $2,300 to the Obama campaign in January.

Read more: CNN.com

I’m in Love: Interior Decorator Antoinette Loupé

I loved this month’s issue of Domino mag, which featured “the Domino 10”. It’s their second annual roundup of the 10 soon-to-be hottest interior decorators across the country. My favorite was Antoinette Loupé. Her mix of old and new combined with soothing neutrals and an ethnic touch was inspiring, and right up my alley.

You can check her out in the mag, or on her site.

How Alice Walker's Papers Went To Emory

In the spring of 1976, a young Rudolph P. Byrd was a graduate student at Yale, his future as a highly respected literary expert at Emory University just a twinkle in his eye. But already he knew what he admired in an author — and she was sitting right there in front of him.

Visiting author Alice Walker was a few years away from publishing her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Color Purple," but her early writings captivated Byrd.

He eagerly joined Walker and a small group of students for lunch at a nearby bistro after she spoke at a conference on African-American women writers.

"The fact that we were sitting together discussing her success and aspirations as a writer and my own aspirations to become a scholar and literary critic at Yale was proof we'd come some distance and the world had changed," Byrd, who is also African-American, recalled recently.

The friendship that began that day would be the catalyst for what some are calling a literary coup: Emory's acquisition late last year of Walker's extensive archive of personal papers.

"When I heard the news, I was green with envy," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and a friend of Byrd's. "I'm looking forward to him giving me a tour of the collection and watching him gloat over a glass of champagne."

Plenty of factors contributed to Walker's decision to house the papers at a school in her native Georgia, from the intangible to the political.

Walker was taken by the ambience of Emory's campus, and she shied away from a school in her adopted California because of policies that she said hurt minority enrollment. But Gates said an overriding factor was clear to him.

"Rudolph Byrd is one of the great scholars of Walker's work and African-American literature," he said. "There is absolutely no doubt that she made this decision because of her friendship and admiration for him."

Read more: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Today's Black Fact

On this day in 1965, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leads thousands of people on a 54 mile march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama to call for voting rights for African Americans.

Obama: Wright Flap Has 'Shaken Me Up'

Sen. Barack Obama told CNN on Wednesday the recent uproar over his former pastor's sermons has reminded him of the odds he faces in winning the White House.

"In some ways, this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional candidates," the Illinois senator told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive one-on-one interview.

Obama declined to speculate on whether the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons may damage him politically, but said his campaign does best when it doesn't follow the "textbook."

"If I was just running the textbook campaign -- doing the conventional thing -- I probably wasn't going to win because Sen. [Hillary] Clinton was going to be much more capable of doing that than I would be," he said.

"We had tremendous success, and I think we were starting to get a little comfortable and conventional right before Texas and Ohio."

The exclusive interview came one day after Obama delivered a speech on race and politics in Philadelphia, during which he denounced some of Wright's comments, but said he could not repudiate the man himself.

Read more: CNN.com

Al Sharpton Says He's Keeping Support For Obama Quiet

The Rev. Al Sharpton is backing Barack Obama, but he's made the strategic decision to keep his support quiet.

That's the message Sharpton delivered to his flock last Saturday as he boasted of talking to Obama "two or three times a week" - and insisted the Democratic front-runner knows the rev is in his camp.

"I said, 'I'm gonna do whatever I gotta do to help you. Hillary Clinton has never done nothing for us,'" said Sharpton, recounting a conversation with Obama for his followers at his group's weekly rally.

"'I won't either endorse you or not endorse you,'" Sharpton said he told the Illinois senator as the two made their way to a Nov. 29 dinner at Sylvia's Restaurant in Harlem. "'But I will tell you I can be freer not endorsing you to help you and everybody else.'"

According to Sharpton, Obama protested and asked for his public support. "'No, no, no. I want you to endorse,'" Sharpton recalled Obama saying.

Sharpton told Obama that it would be better strategically for him to remain publicly neutral.

"If I endorse you, and they jump on somebody in Jena, you're going to want me not to go because the press is going to ask you what about your supporter," Sharpton said.

"Negroes just [ask], 'What, what's Sharpton gonna do,'" he explained. "If you understand strategy, you get somewhere."

An endorsement from the controversial Sharpton is a double-edged sword, impressing some voters and driving others away.

Read more: Daily News

Black Infants Are More Likely To Be Born Preterm

The African-American infant mortality rate is more than twice as high as white Americans and the preterm birth rate for black women averaged 17.6 percent, compared to the national average of 12.3 between 2002 and 2004.



These statistics, and others related to birth outcomes, are discussed in a new PBS documentary "When the Bough Breaks." This episode, scheduled to air Thursday, April 3, at 10:00 PM (check local PBS listings), is part of the four-hour series entitled "Unnatural Causes -- Is Inequality Making Us Sick?" that was produced by California Newsreel and presented by the National Minority Consortia of public television. The March of Dimes is an official outreach partner for the series in conjunction with other leading public health, policy and community-based organizations.



"Racial and ethnic disparities in premature birth are troubling and persistent," said Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, president of the March of Dimes. "We face an urgent need for effective prevention programs and interventions to reverse a serious trend that has lasted too long. That's going to take influencing lawmakers to enact meaningful policy changes that will increase access to affordable health care coverage and committing more public dollars to prevention programs and to research so that we may find answers."

Read more: eMaxHealth

Today's Black Fact(s)

1. On this day in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is published in Boston.

2. On this day in 1950, Dr. Ralph Bunche receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a mediator in the Palestine crisis. He is the first African American to be so honored.