Obama man Bill Bradley and US Representative Nita Lowey of New York, a Clinton supporter, offered more of the arguments to which we've already become accustomed in talking up their respective candidates this morning on Meet the Press.
For a more incisive look at the state of the Democratic contest, read a Matt Bai piece in today's New York Times Magazine, entitled What's the Real Racial Divide?
Here's the heart of it:
It is also possible, however, that the disparity between Obama’s performance in urban primaries and rural caucuses tells us something larger — and counterintuitive — about race in America.
The assumption has always been that a black candidate should perform worse among white voters in states with less racial diversity because those voters are supposedly less enlightened. In fact, the reverse has been true for Obama: in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, he carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.
What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so. The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage payments. As Erica Goode wrote in these pages last year, Robert Putnam and other sociologists have, in fact, found that people living in more diverse areas evince less trust for others — no matter what their race. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that while white Democrats in rural states are apparently willing to accept the notion of a racially transcendent candidate, those living in the shadow of postindustrial atrophy seem to have a harder time detaching from enduring stereotypes, and they may be less optimistic that the country as a whole would actually elect a black candidate.
Part of the last sentence -- "the shadow of postindustrial atrophy" -- sounds like a ringer for Rhode Island, where, despite high hopes among some Obama supporters, Hillary cleaned his clock, by 12 18 points.
Could Obama have done better here, and by extension, in other states where Hillary has won? I think so. For starters, his campaign didn't seem to tailor a specific effort to target the older voters who abound in Rhode Island.
Ultimately, the implications are existential for Obama's presidential hopes, particularly as he is likely to face more heat over his minister problem.
As Bai writes, in closing out his piece:
Obama holds himself out as the candidate whose own life and lineage embody the nation’s new racial complexities. The question is whether he can win the sprawling states that embody them too.