Memo to The Huntsville Times: Check your facts
Huntsville Times reporter Bob Lowry was just so eager to amplify the whole “OMG, Artur Davis is black and running for AL Governor” narrative that he made a pretty sloppy mistake that deserves to be pointed out.
One of the biggest questions looming in Alabama’s 2010 elections is whether one of the reddest states in America could elect an African-American as governor.
Another unknown is what role the economy will play and which party it will affect.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican John McCain handily won Alabama with 88 percent of the vote.
Against that backdrop, black Congressman Artur Davis of Birmingham announced in February that he would seek the Democratic nomination for governor.
I’ll be writing more on the story lines in the 2010 AL Governors race in the coming days, including the issue of Artur Davis and his skin pigmentation. But first let’s take a trip over to the Alabama Secretary of State’s website and check the certified results of the 2008 presidential race in Alabama:
- Barack Obama: 813,479
- John McCain: 1,266,546
- Other people: 19,794
So the total number of votes is 2,099,819. John McCain won 60% of the votes, Obama won 39%. Hmmm… Seems like Mr. Lowry was off by a wee bit.
But when the media is running the “against-all-odds underdog black politician in a racist southern state” yarn the facts don’t matter, just the point. Stretching the facts just helps to underscore the point. The point is that Alabama is full of bigots who voted against Obama because he is a dark skinned man. Therefore, because Davis is black he faces a daunting, neigh impossible task. Except another pesky fact gets in the way of that claim.
Let’s go to the Alabama SOS website again and go way back to 2004. George Bush won 62% of that vote. John Kerry, who is white by the way, hauled in a paltry 37%.
In case you’re scratching your head now, I don’t blame you. Somehow this incredibly racist state cost more votes, both in terms of actual votes and percentage, for a black man rather than for a haughty, French looking New Englander. Maybe there is something other than rampant racism at play here. The (supposedly) conservative Republican won each of the two races over a liberal Democrat opponent by about 60/40. Maybe this state just favors more conservative candidates over liberals regardless of their skin color. But that doesn’t fit the narrative. Better to just say McCain won 88% of the votes.
“With 88 percent of the ( WHITE) vote” — inserting the word “white” would have made lowry’s sentence correct. It is very unlikely that we’ll ever know why that word wasn’t in there. whether lowry mistakenly left the word out, whether an editor along the line made the mistake of taking it out because of ignorance, or what happened. But i just can’t believe that lowry and/or the editors made that mistake on purpose. Did a correction ever run? one needs to.
Ivan, I have three follow up points:
1) How does Lowry know how white people voted? You don’t mark your race on the ballot. At best he could claim how whites and blacks were polling, not how they voted.
2) I wonder what the percentage of blacks voting for Obama (or Kerry) was. If it was north of 88% do you think Lowry would write about it with the same breathlessness?
3) Let’s say you’re right and 88% of whites did vote for McCain. That only means anything if you looked at the 2004 race and saw that far less than that voted for Bush. It could simply mean that 88% of whites support (supposedly) conservative politicians over liberal ones and Lowry is misattributing the statistic to fit his desired narrative.
Geez, Lowry strikes again today:
On the day he defected to the Republican Party, U.S. Rep. Parker Griffith gave Mike Hubbard, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, a heads up in an early morning phone call.
Joe Turnham, chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party, which spent millions of dollars and worked thousands of man-hours helping elect Griffith, said he didn’t get so much as a call, a tweet, an e-mail or a letter from Griffith Tuesday morning.
—
Millions of dollars! Really? That is hard to believe since Griffith’s total receipts for the 2008 congressional race was $1,843,948. Of that he received $200 from the Madison County Democrat Party. Maybe he got a few thousand in PAC money from AL Democrat related PACs. Certainly he didn’t get MILLIONS from the Alabama Democrat Party (he didn’t get millions from anyone!). The Alabama Democrat Party doesn’t even HAVE millions of dollars to give to anyone, let alone a candidate for a federal race.
More sloppiness for Lowry to just regurgitate Turnham’s claim without so much as a simple internet search to verify it. Hold on, maybe the claim is true and Turnham was just secretly funneling millions of dollars to Griffith in contravention of established campaign finance laws!
The thing to remember with the “millions of dollars” comments is the independent expenditures spent by the DCCC in the 2008 race. In that race, they spent $1, 066,918 on Griffith (compared to about $600,000 the NRCC spent on Parker). You’d have to look at some finance reports to see how the Alabama Democratic Party sent to the DCCC, but this distinction could make the article a bit cleaner.
Here is a link to the open secrets report on this. Copy and paste. http://www.opensecrets.org/races/indexp.php?cycle=2008&id=AL05
Good point, but I think we both know the AL Dems didn’t give anywhere near $1M (let alone millions) to the DCCC. Bottom line is that Turnham’s comment is untrue.
Brian’s rightly raises three points following up on what i had to say about the omission of the word “white” in Bob Lowry’s article (the first one he mentions). It has inspired me to come up with a new political theory to apply to political reporting, when appropriate, such as in this situation. it’s the political theory of “Accepted Statistical Suppositions” or, to use its acronym, “ASS.” Brian is right — the article should have attributed the percentage to exit polling, which, if done honestly, is, I think, accurate. No answer to Brian’s second point. on the third point Brian makes, we need to factor in the percent of people who voted solely on race. I know more than just a few.
Well I am too lazy to look up my source this morning but the exit numbers I read had Obama with 98.2 of the black vote, now THAT is not the vote of a informed electorate, that is the stamp of a cult mentality. Any of you that heard Howard Stern’s “man in the street” interviews in Harlem know what I mean. He could have been a serial killer and they would have voted for him.
dcm
ps: worth noting its the only time I think Howard Stern did anything I thought was worth my time to listen.
we’ve always had some kind of identity voting in america. some political theorists talk about kennedy’s catholicism costing him votes. surely it did in some areas — in eastern kentucky kennedy was referred to as a “Papist.” that sounded worse than “catholic” in the appalachian hills. but others point out that it also stirred out a bigger catholic vote for kennedy than a non-Catholic might have gotten. Blacks turning out in huge percentages for the first black nominee for president doesn’t make it a “cult mentality” vote. especially when you take into account that a very large percentage of blacks vote democratic.
It is indeed a cult mentality when you don’t care about the issues nor any facts about the candidate. You will vote for him regardless and thats what happened, after calling white people racist all these years the black community voted skin color and could have cared less about his platform. He was black and thats all that mattered, cult mentality………
ivan – “always” didn’t begin in 1960. ‘Identity’ politics is a leftist phenomenon that doesn’t belong to a liberty-loving people.
I used the 1960 election to make a point about identity politics because it was the first election to come to mind. The Al smith election of 1928 had our first Catholic nominee and i guess there are studies showing in heavily catholic areas the vote was bigger than normal. Alabama, i’m told, was stolen for smith because leaders didn’t want the record to show that alabama would vote for a republican. People with more knowledge in this field than i have may want to comment. But how does identity politics become “leftist”? how does voting for someone because you identify with him or her for religious, ethnic, racial reasons become a matter of left or right? Nancy Pelosi’s photos show she is amply endowed in bra size. Does that bring out the “tit man” vote for her in her district? Is it her secret power over House Democratic men? Is it leftist if the left one gets to congressman more than the right one?
Obama is not our first black president. Warren G. Harding beyond a doubt had African antecedents. he was taunted about it as a child in Marion, Ohio. He had relatives who taught inWashington all-black schools with all black faculties. The evidence is even more conclusive than the black connection to some of jefferson’s descendants, but nobody gives a hoot about harding so we call Obama our first black president. Maybe if McCain had made this an issue in the election some black voters in close states would not have bothered to vote, the election could have come out differently, and identity politics would have a different hue.
Ivan, I don’t believe I’ve ever considered the “tit man” vote before! If such a voting bloc exists then Sen. Vitter better beware a potential challenge from porn starlet Stormy Daniels (not withstanding her summer arrest on domestic assault charges). Maybe the “tit man” voters could form their own third party and become a political
farceforce.And yes, Republicans play identity politics as well. Remember Peggy Noonan’s off-camera, profane attack on the selection of Sarah Palin as “political bull**** about narratives.” Noonan ultimately was proven to be correct.
Lowry’s never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Her he’s one paycheck from being out of work. Turnham didn’t lift a finger for griffith’s “millions” and you all know that. 88 percent? Wow bob lowry, today’s worst person in the world. As Olberman would say