After the first black president, who will be second? |
After the first black president, who will be second?
The Washington Post
2013-01-20
Vanessa Williams
President Obama’s historic election in 2008 and his reelection last year proved decisively that race is no longer an insurmountable hurdle to high political office in the United States.
But the current pool of possible candidates suggests that the next black president will not be taking the oath of office anytime soon.
“In the shadow of Barack Obama, there’s not been a lot of growth,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who was involved in the president’s 2008 campaign, said. “It is really hard for minorities to get elected at the statewide level, and before you start talking about president, frankly, you have to get elected to statewide office.”
The notion of a post-Obama reformation of black politics has not been borne out at the ballot box, as black politicians continue to struggle to win the statewide offices that are the traditional paths to the presidency.
While the election of the first black president marked a significant break from the country’s history of racial prejudice, race still matters: The vast majority of black elected officials are put into office by black voters. Even Obama needed large numbers of black and Latino votes to win, particularly last year, when a majority of whites voters voted for someone else…
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