Weird Deer

(Editor’s Note: This letter from Paul Killebrew to Katie Geha ran on Super Tuesday to general acclaim. In light of this, and thinking a bit about this, it seems prescient once again (Edwards focus notwithstanding), so we’re re-posting it for your perusal and reconsideration. To any readers out there in Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, or Oregon: Weird Deer encourages you to vote for who you think can do the job best, not who you think other people will think other people might think can do the job best. Also, there’s a new special treat at the end of the letter, so don’t say we never did anything for you.)

Dear Katie,

Our talk about the election the other day got me thinking about the issue of electability, which is something I wish nobody thought about. In fact, I’m beginning to think that “electability” is usually just a proxy for other concerns that for some reason we can’t seem to get at directly.

John Edwards, clawing for relevance at the January 21st debate, insinuated that he, as a white male, is the most electable Democrat running for president, thereby achieving a major technological advance in the politics of race- and sex-baiting. In effect he’s saying, “Listen, I know that you, humble Democrats, are not racist misogynists, but can you really depend on the rest of America not to be? I’m not asking you to pick me because you don’t like black people or women, but because they don’t.”

For reasons that others have made plenty clear, electability is a bad way to figure out who to vote for. Caring about electability means making a lot of assumptions about what other people care about, and since none of us really has any idea what drives even our closest loved ones, the electability question becomes a place of wild speculation and fearmongering. Electability killed Howard Dean, and look what good that did us.

In Edwards’s case, he’s using electability as a stand-in for race and gender bias–and this from a progressive Democrat, no less–but he’s doing it in such a way that the individual voter doesn’t have to feel like the racist misogynist.

I don’t think this is particularly new. Saying, “I’m not voting for Obama/Hillary because I don’t think America will actually elect a black/female president” doesn’t sound a whole lot different from such discrimination classics as “I didn’t hire him because I don’t think our customers would feel comfortable dealing with somebody with dreadlocks” or “The guys in management won’t take you seriously if you wear blouses like that.”

This kind of “Hey, don’t look at me” discrimination is incredibly pernicious. It makes the speaker feel innocent because (1) he doesn’t appear to be drawing on personally held prejudices and (2) the content of the statement might even be marginally true—racist customers might get all weird, misogynist bosses might leer condescendingly, and some voters might not be ready for a black or female president (though it’s worth asking if any Democratic candidate really has a shot at their votes anyway). Even if the statements are true, there’s no reason our misguided speaker should be advancing the racist/misogynist cause by acting as its proxy. And the pass-the-buck quality of the statements make you wonder if he’s really just worried about saying something far more direct that could land him in deep doodoo.

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But the point I was getting at was this electability thing, and I was going to say that popular suffrage implicates the individual intellect—this whole thing rides on most of us making the correct choice, using whatever faculties we have. By now we know all about the candidates’ policy positions, their experience, their endorsements, their ability to imitate black southerners, and so on. It’s too much to think about, so at this point I’m just trying to winnow down the relevant criteria, and electability—along with whatever strange ideas I might fill it with—is the first to go.

Happy voting,
Paul

Postscript 5/7/08

Hopefully after last night we’ve seen the last of electability anxiety, but the polls Travis linked to above are worth thinking about for a minute. One of the things we’re seeing when people talk about electability–the letter to Katie touched on this–is how race and gender bias works nowadays. The New York Times tells us that a “majority of American voters say the furor over the relationship between Senator Barack Obama and his former pastor has not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number say that it could influence voters this fall . . . .” In other words, people think that Rev. Wright is shaping up to be an electability problem. But notice how schizophrenic this all is–“Rev. Wright doesn’t bother me, but I bet it bothers other people, and that makes me concerned.” We’ve seen this sentiment before: “I’m not racist, but I’m not so naive as to think we live in a post-racial world.” That may be an important acknowledgment of injustice, and I guess it’s possible that even Obama can’t overcome America’s racism, but I don’t think it counts as a legitimate reason not to vote for him. There are points where concessions about injustice become complicity in them. This is one.

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