Women perhaps, but I'm not so sure about the churchgoer part:

Female voters...were particularly generous to Clinton with their ballots on Tuesday. According to CNN exit polls, 71 percent of female voters backed Clinton, with a healthy 59 percent of men also supporting her.

Cultural issues also loomed large on voters’ minds. Thirty percent of those surveyed said Obama shared the views of his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, at least “somewhat,” according to the exit surveys. Exit pools also had Clinton winning the support of 66 percent of those who said they attend church “more than weekly” and 60 percent who go to services weekly.

I never was a math whiz, but it seems to me that if Clinton won the state by roughly two-thirds to one-third, and she won churchgoers by the same ratio, that proves pretty much nothing, right? They weren't a particular strength or weakness for her - she just won them like she won everybody else. Somebody who understands statistics, straighten me out.

But there are other problems here:

Barely one-third of Clinton supporters said they would vote for the Illinois senator over McCain in the general election, according to exit polling conducted for the Associated Press and television networks. Just as many said they would vote for the Republican over Obama, while about 25 percent said they would not cast presidential ballots.

More than anything else, economic factors influenced voters in West Virginia, where the median family income is roughly $12,500 below the national median of about $58,500.

If economic factors influence voters "more than anything else," how can women and churchgoers "fuel" Clinton's victory?

More important than sloppy headline writing, what's the elephant in the room here? Race? Culture? Seems to me that such a stunning lack of support for an Obama candidacy among Clinton voters fairly cries out for more interpretation.

But then I'm just a pinhead pastor.

Whoops. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hillary Clinton lost Catholic votes between Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina:

In Pennsylvania, Sen. Clinton beat Sen. Barack Obama by 40 points among Catholics. In Indiana, Sen. Obama sliced that deficit in half, earning 41% of the Catholic vote to Sen. Clinton's 59%. And in North Carolina Sen. Clinton won among Catholics by a scant seven points.

All sorts of reasons are advanced for this shift, most of which are more or less stupid. (Honestly, a "nun theory"?) The one I find persuasive is that Pennsylvania Catholics are a little more downscale than those in Indiana or particularly North Carolina. Clinton apparently resonates with the culturally conservative white working class - the union folks, who skew Catholic. But Obama's learning how to reach out to them, and as things go along, the rationale for a Clinton campaign keeps dropping, which has to hurt her with all the various demographics.

As it stands, she'll soon be forced out of the race anyway, but this is just one more piece of data suggested that her "electability" narrative is a crock.

I actually thought this was way more interesting:

In a recent survey of 19 states that have held a presidential primary this year, 63% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 37% for Republicans, a sharp increase from 2005 when 42% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats. One of every four voters in the U.S. is Catholic.

Catholics have been a swing vote since the early 70's, and it looks like they're swinging right back into the Democratic camp. This does not bode well for the GOP: even a temporary shift in Catholic sentiment could be enough to establish the generational realignment that seems to be in the offing these days. As for John McCain: he needs to hold Texas and Florida and pick off at least one of the heavily Catholic Rust Belt states - Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, or Wisconsin - to have any, erm, prayer of taking the election.

Whoops.

There are at least couple of ways of looking at it. Real Clear Politics says that Obama did better than expected in Central PA, aka "Pennsyltucky":

Obama did not improve relative to Ohio in Erie, Pittsburgh, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, or even Philadelphia. However, he did improve in the "Middle T" of the state. This improvement was not puny. If we compare a county in Ohio to one in central Pennsylvania with similar racial, income, and age demographics, we should find Clinton's margin to be 7 to 17 points smaller in the Pennsylvania county.

...

[C]entral Pennsylvania is the most Republican part of the state. We have found again and again in this primary season that, outside of the South, white Democrats in heavily Republican areas tend to prefer Obama more than other areas. It is unclear what has caused this trend, but the observations in central Pennsylvania are consistent with it.

Finally, we should note the irony of central Pennsylvania's support of Obama. These are the locations where you can find many of the "small towns" about which Obama was speaking in San Francisco - and yet they seemed to be tilted in his favor. In a certain sense, small town Pennsylvanians preferred Obama more than the rest of the state!

The second graf here is the nut. Democrats who live in places like Central PA tend to be either socially conservative union types or hard-core liberals. You have to be sure of your convictions to disagree with the mores in a place like Lancaster or Lebanon or York. So one way to describe what happened in the primary is that Obama was able to bring out relatively more of the second kind in the center part of the state than Clinton could the first kind. And of course in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia she brought out way more than he did, hence her margin of victory.

But another way of describing socially conservative union types in a place like Pennsylvania is "working-class Catholics." And John Green seems to think Obama has a problem with them:

The religious affiliation of voters played a major role in the outcome, but the patterns were very similar to those seen in the nominating contests in other states. According to the exit polls, Clinton did very well with white Catholics, winning 72% of their vote. She also did well with white Protestants and Jews, winning 59% and 61% of their votes, respectively.

...

It is worth noting, however, that Clinton received 74% of the vote among white Catholics who attend worship services at least once a week – a substantially larger percentage than her support among people with incomes of less than $50,000 (54%), women (59%), people over 60 years old (62%), gun owners (63%), high school graduates (64%) and rural residents (64%). And it was also substantially higher than her 59% among voters who said race was a factor when they cast their ballot.

To Green's credit, he cautions that this trend may or may not persist into the general election. Clinton's in to this demographic is through the unions, and they're not about to send their members to McCain. Green's also correct, however, that white Catholics are a swing group. Come about September, I'm going to be watching their numbers pretty carefully.

And the bottom line is that essentially, the more socially conservative the population, the better Clinton did. Which only makes sense when you consider the kind of campaign she's been running. Which is all the more reason to hope that what happened to Obama in Pennsylvania doesn't happen to him nationally.

Hillary Clinton.

Beyond Silly Season. Can there be reason in the campaign?

Originally posted at Howard-Empowered People

The latest from Hillary Clinton...

"You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

(Shakes head)

Oh, Hillary, what are we going to do with you? You have been saying for months that you're "ready on day one". But, you remember that saying about how "everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten"? I think maybe you were absent for a pretty important lesson...

Here is the church, and here is the steeple

Open the door and see all the people.

All the people, Hillary. Not just the pastor. Setting aside for a moment the concepts of forgiveness and redemption, and, oh, I don't know, choosing to stay with someone who's made a mistake of some sort, disagreeing with one's pastor is not necessarily reason enough to leave one's church home.

Here is my (sorta) weekly tour of the internet - and some things that struck me as interesting:

I want to add to my statement below, which I had to toss off rather more quickly than was comfortable.

Over the past months, people have occasionally accused me of being in Obama's camp. And sure, I just plain liked the guy better than Clinton or Edwards. I suppose there's also a natural inclination to root for the UCC'er in the campaign. We are only 1% of the population, you know.

But when I said that any of the Democratic candidates would have been just ducky with me, it was true. Up until very recently, any of the three leaders would have been perfectly acceptable. While I might have had more enthusiasm for Obama, there was by no means any disappointment in the prospect of a Clinton presidency. My calculation was that it would be easier to push a Pres. Obama left on important issues than a Pres. Clinton, but that kind of math is really just an educated guess. I would have been happily proved wrong on that score.

But my feelings started to change when Fox News manufactured the Jeremiah Wright controversy.

At first, it didn't have anything to do with Hillary.

I think what it was, more than anything, was a growing realization that the Wright controversy had upped the racial ante in this election significantly. We all knew that having Obama come anywhere close to the nomination would increase racial polarization, and we all knew that the Republicans would trot out racial stereotypes just as quickly as they could while maintaining their nominal fig leaf. That's not what I meant.

What I meant was: for every election for as long as I can remember, Democrats have been presented with two choices in an election. There's the dude who will almost certainly make the racial situation worse - that would be the Republican - and then there's the dude who will probably leave things alone or let them slide a little. That'd be the Democrat.

Sure, sure, Jesse Jackson looked like he was going to make some trouble in the 80's. How long did that last? Fifteen minutes? Al Sharpton never even made it out of "joke candidate" status.

No matter how you slice it, the race issue is a party the Democrats haven't shown up at in forever. Hubert Humphrey slipped out for a pack of smokes in '68, and we haven't been heard from except in apology since. Literally my entire life has been one long series of waffles, hedges, postponements and disappointments on this score.

And I'd made my peace with that. Really I had.

But then that scary black preacher threw it back on the national plate, and miracle of miracles, Obama stepped up to the moment. Grudgingly, yes. Not entirely coherently. Imperfectly.

But the fact remains that all of a sudden, Democrats were presented another option: a candidate who might actually advance the racial conversation in this nation. Again, not perfectly, and not always in the way that a good old-fashioned white liberal thought it should be. But perhaps some things might get said. Like: massive injustice and inequalities in opportunity still exist. Institutional racism still exists. The work of desegregation needs to continue. White resentment still wins political campaigns and makes bloated idiots even happier. That sort of thing.

So now we've got three candidates and three choices: move forward, stay the same, move backward. Problem is, I'm not sure who's who anymore. Because it sure as hell wasn't John McCain stoking the flames of racialism or trying to kneecap the most talented black politician in a generation. Nor was it McCain comparing the strongest single institution in the fight for black civil rights to the Klan.

At the very best, Clinton comes out of this with a nomination and an electorate split straight down racial lines. She will have utterly no credibility if she tries to implement any kind of social justice program, even if she makes it into office. And for that small margin, she risks setting the conversation back at least to the time of Reagan.

I'm under no illusions about Obama's abilities in this area, either. As President, he would be forced to dart and weave on the subject, and there will be so much else to look at on his agenda. Any accomplishments he might make will be as fragile as glass. He will disappoint progressives, there's no doubt about that. And that's before we start looking at the substance of his economic, military or foreign policy proposals, or factor in the endless hostile shenanigans of the GOP. They love playing defense. It's what they're good at.

But my personal ethics won't allow me to vote for somebody I think will hurt the cause of racial justice. Even though I've been committed to that cause my entire life, the reality of the situation is just starting to sink in now. I think it's because I never expected that I'd have to choose between Democrat and a Democrat on this score.

You may vote for whomever you choose come November. Street Prophets does not and will not make endorsements. But I can tell you that my list of candidates I will not vote for just got longer by one, and I couldn't be less thrilled about it.

Sorry, I can't pretend to be neutral after this garbage:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.” …

The Clinton campaign has refrained from getting involved in the controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question, denounced what she said was “hate speech.”

“You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that,” Clinton said. “I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving.”

How screwed up is this? It's so screwed up that, as Steve Benen points out, both John McCain and Mike Huckabee have defended Obama while Hillary goes after him. And per Booman, she's got some nerve, considering her own connections.

I'm with Booman: this is not the lowest of the low roads, but it has the potential to open the door to all kinds of destructive racial narratives. That takes beyond the fate of the Democratic party to the health of our society itself.

For the good of the party and the nation, Democratic leaders, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Howard Dean, need to call this contest over. Scorched earth is not an acceptable political strategy.

A couple of people have brought this clip from a Jeremiah Wright sermon to my attention:

This is of course part of the two-pronged effort to attack Obama's religious beliefs: smear him as a Muslim, and if not a Muslim, a member of a radical, "racist" church. It makes sense, if you think about it: it's one of the few ways conservatives have to define Obama before he defines himself.

The bad news is that it works among the uninformed. The good news is that more people are becoming informed.

As for the clip itself, I didn't see anything offensive. Harsh, perhaps, but nothing to get our knickers in a knot over. Wright's point - to a congregation in one of the blackest and poorest neighborhoods in Chicago - is that Jesus understands their plight. The stuff about Obama is a tangent. So unless conservatives want to argue that Jesus didn't know anything about being poor and can't sympathize with them (an utterly un-Biblical proposition), they need to sit down, shut up, and let him have his religious freedom.

They're not about to do that, because being black and race conscious is a sin like unto no other besides being an unrepentant Muslim. Wright is a millstone around Obama's neck, and they're going to use the weight for all it's worth.

Not that Wright cares. He's not about to muzzle himself for the sake of Obama's campaign. His job is to preach the good news to the people he knows, and that's what he's going to keep doing. In fact, I have a hard time seeing this as anything but Wright's attempt to pen Obama in a bit on race, make him dig a little deeper than his usual fuzzy generalities.

Some people have complained that it's ahistorical to preach Jesus as an African. It's not, actually.

Or rather, it's no less ahistorical than any other way of envisioning Jesus. The fact of the matter is that Jesus was likely a dark-skinned mutt, which leaves the door open to many interpretations. More to the point, since we don't actually have any pictures of him, the way we depict Jesus says more about our appropriation of his life than the man himself.

Bottom line: I'll worry about a black Jesus when the pictures of a blond-haired, blue-eyed super-Aryan are no longer the dominant image. And I'll worry about Hillary Clinton's feelings after FoxNews goes out of business.

Sorry, I accidentally deleted this diary with previous comments when I tried to delete a duplicate draft. My apologies.

A few weeks ago, I watched a very dispiriting display of the destructive forces of the ego on a segment of the Newshour titled Democratic Battle Plan. Judy Woodruff was interviewing Howard Wolfson, the Communications Director for Hillary, and David Axelrod, the Chief Strategist for Obama.

I heard nothing but distortion and attack from a downright nasty Wolfson, in sharp contrast to Axelrod, who somehow managed to keep from being baited or reacting in kind. This brought back some painful memories of the 2004 primaries and the lies and attacks heaped on Howard Dean from all quarters, but most dishearteningly from the Democratic party "establishment," i.e., DLC minions. (IMO, we can add them to the list of those to thank for the past 8 years of the looting and undermining of our government by this administration; but I digress.)

Okay, I admit it. I was hoping Barack Obama would take Texas and Ohio the other night. It's not that I don't like Hillary Clinton - I think she'd make a fine president - but Obama's surge was incredible to watch. Where we're at now is sort of like watching, well, Brett Favre march down the field only to end his drive with a disputed field goal. They're reviewing the tapes right now, and we'll just have to see how the rest of the game plays out.

And of course whoever wins goes on to the championships against the Bears. Boo, hiss.

Anyway, I thought this OpenLeft diary rolling up the exit polls was fascinating. There's all sorts of intriguing data, but the part that caught my eye, naturally enough, was this:

Religion		Composite	Clinton	Obama
Protestant		21%	48%	46%
Catholic		28%	59%	37%
Other Christian		19%	35%	61%
Jewish		5%	56%	42%
Other		7%	39%	57%
None		14%	40%	47%

How crazy is it that Obama, with all his foregrounded faith, can't take the Protestant or Catholic demographics from Hillary? I'm assuming that the "Other Christian" includes non-denominational evangelicals, and there Obama takes a convincing lead. Taken together with his strong lead among the 3% of self-described Republicans who have crossed over this cycle, I'd say that means that pretty much every conservative evangelical that has gone Democratic has voted for Obama.

More craziness: after all the crap Obama took from the netroots about his faith speeches seeming to leave out the non-religious, he has a strong, though not overwhelming lead among that very group. Is this the "creative class" coming through for a new-style candidate? I guess we'll find out.