I’ve got a little piece of California in me,” averred Barack Obama, staking a modest claim to what was rapidly emerging as the most precious piece of real estate in Super Tuesday’s primaries. The state’s First Lady was far more effusive in her assessment. “If Barack Obama was a state, he’d be California,” declared Maria Shriver in a fit of Kennedyesque munificence. “I mean, think about it: diverse, open, smart, independent, bucks tradition, innovative, inspiring, dreamer, leader.” At the time, Shriver’s endorsement seemed prophetic, offered as it was at the ultimate “girl power” rally, headlined by Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama, aimed at Hillary Clinton’s most treasured constituency in the heart of what has long been considered — next to New York and Arkansas — her political backyard. With Ted Kennedy barnstorming across the state, wooing Latino voters in execrable Spanish, and a flurry of polls repeating the now-familiar election-eve pattern of surging Obama momentum, the Clinton “firewall” was beginning to look precarious. In the end, however, conventional wisdom and established strength triumphed at the ballot box. It was about women and Latino voters, after all, and they came out in large numbers on election day to award Hillary Clinton the state by a ten-point margin. In many ways the California results marked the triumph of tribalism, with each constituency — blacks, Latinos, women, blue-collar workers, Asian-Americans, the young and the old — picking its side. But lost in the horse-race punditry, which thrives on slice-and-dice demographic calculations, are the darker implications of such herdlike behaviour for both candidates. According to the exit polls, women favoured Clinton by a staggering 59 to 34 per cent over Obama. The numbers (skewed by her across-the-board Latino support) disguise a disconnect with white men, who chose Obama by an astounding 20-point margin. And California’s male pro-Obama tilt reflects a national 50-to-44 per cent split in his favour. Excerpted from an article by Lakshmi Chaudhry in the February 25 issue of ‘The Nation’
