Race, Identity Sensitive Issues in Campaign '08

With the McCain campaign's recent mini-controversy over a supporter's introductory remarks at a town hall rally stressing Barak Obama's middle name, it looks as though a new era of top-level racial senstitivity has arrived:

The Los Angeles Times has the story:

When John McCain apologized to Barack Obama this week for the comments of his warm-up act at a rally, it was not the first time -- and probably won't be the last -- that the most competitive black presidential candidate in U.S. history has heard the words, "I'm sorry."

In his yearlong quest to win the White House, the Democratic senator from Illinois has changed the rules of political engagement, forcing his rivals to step delicately in a normally no-holds-barred arena.

As the possibility grows that voters may bestow the nation's highest public office on an African American, serial public apologies -- largely by Democrats -- show just how sensitive race remains. What is less clear is how race could help or hinder Obama, who has struggled to keep it in the background.

If current or future opponents focus on Obama's race, it could help them by playing on some voters' racial prejudice, or it could help Obama if he is seen as a sympathetic victim of his rivals' insensitivity.

Hey, what happened to the "Obama's Bradley effect?"

I thought race was supposed drag down black candidates at the polls, not give them an advantage? Maybe there's a "Reverse Bradley Effect" working to give black candidates an edge, since questions of race can't be raised for fears of allegations of insensitivity. Boy, it's tough to run a campaign these days...

And don't even get me going about religion!

Throughout Obama's campaign, foes have invoked his middle name as a kind of dual-use code word to remind voters of his African ancestry and call into question his Christian faith.

McCain had not arrived at the rally in time to hear Cunningham's remarks. Asked whether Obama's middle name -- a family name of Arab descent -- was appropriate fodder for political discourse, McCain said, "No, it is not. . . . I absolutely repudiate such comments."

Now, seriously, McCain made the right call on the "Hussein" smear, simply because Obama's not Muslim and he's got no ties to international Islamic terrorism.

Domestic terrorism another story, however. Will Obama's ties to former Chicago Weathermen be off the table of reasonable campaign challenges and debate?

Geez, it's getting to be so that a guy can't raise old-fashioned questions of character these days, not to mention sling a little mud!

Blog Posts Lead to Japanese Murder Suspect's Arrest

Because I blog on controversial topics, I never post personal information, family pictures, or specific travel itineraries. It's enough that I'm a public blogger, not to mention that I've had serious threats against my safety on more than one occasion.

Thus, given the often rough nature of online publishing, I'd expect bloggers to use that kind of caution.

I guess that's not so in the case of Kazuyoshi Miura, a Japanese national wanted for the suspect murder of his wife in Los Angeles 27 years ago. The Los Angeles Times has the story:

In the end, it was his own Internet blog that helped Los Angeles detectives nab Kazuyoshi Miura.

The Japanese businessman was wanted for allegedly hiring a gunman to shoot his 28-year-old wife, Kazumi, on a downtown Los Angeles street 27 years ago. Miura, who was wounded in the attack, made it appear to be a random crime, fanning Japanese fears of a city known for its street violence.

Miura was arrested Friday while trying to leave Saipan, a popular tourist destination in the Pacific north of Guam. He had remained in the sights of the Los Angeles Police Department as a generation of homicide investigators came and went.

The 60-year-old suspect spent 13 years in Japanese prison after being convicted in that country of attempted murder for an earlier attack on his wife in a Little Tokyo hotel in Los Angeles. He was also convicted in Japan for the murder of his wife, but the case was overturned on appeal.

Miura, who was charged here with murder two decades ago, had remained out of the reach of Los Angeles police and prosecutors until the persistence of retired police Lt. Jimmy Sakoda and other detectives finally paid off, officials told The Times.

For the last two years, police had been monitoring a blog written by Miura, who had become a crime sensation in Japan because of saturation media coverage of his case. In recent blog postings, he spoke of his international travel plans, including a possible trip to Saipan.

Sakoda, who worked with Japanese authorities in their prosecution of Miura, had maintained contact with his international counterparts and immigration officials in Saipan, according to Det. Rick Jackson of the LAPD's Cold Case Homicide Unit.

When Jackson got a call last year from Sakoda about the blog postings, detectives alerted Immigration and Customs officials in Guam and Saipan, both U.S. territories, to be on the lookout for Miura.

On Friday, immigration agents caught Miura as he was preparing to leave the island for Japan. The arrest culminated a case that has spanned three decades and has become one of the most sensational crimes in Japanese history -- that nation's version of the O.J. Simpson case.

"It was just a matter of wait and see," Jackson said of the final push to catch Miura. "If he left [Japan], and whether things would work out with our liaisons in other countries."

Miura, who has repeatedly denied involvement in his wife's murder, is awaiting extradition back to Los Angeles.

Additional details on the case will be discussed this afternoon at a City Hall news conference. Officials said that, based on recent court decisions, prosecuting Miura again in Los Angeles in his wife's murder does not violate the ban against legal double jeopardy.

Well, it's safe to say Miura didn't have time to make guest-blogger arrangments. Extented vacations can be murder on blog traffic.

The Search for the Next Dayton Housewife

Karlyn Bowman and Ruy Teixeira provide an intereting analysis of this year's election demographics, at the Wall Street Journal:

Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon introduced us to the Dayton housewife in their famous 1970 book, "The Real Majority." She was blue-collar and from middle America. She was middle aged and her views were moderate. Since their pioneering work, analysts, pundits and soothsayers have followed in hot pursuit, looking for the group holding the keys to the next presidential election.

In recent years, angry white men, soccer moms and Nascar dads have joined their Dayton housewife. Today's leading contender for the Democrats appears to be waitress moms.

There's usually some truth to the political shorthand, but only some. Soccer moms, supposedly college-educated women with children who lived in the suburbs, were 1996's great political icon. But most suburban women are not college educated, large numbers do not have children, and together those two groups were more important in that election than their college-educated cousins. This fact was lost in the buzz.

Still, the evolution of American politics is bound up with demographic and geographic change. So what are the trends to watch in 2008? A number of them will be examined today at an American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Institution conference featuring leading demographers and geographers.

The authors highlight a number of changing trends in the electorate:

• Hispanic voters are becoming increasingly important.
• Evangelicals are an important, but not overwhelming, force.
• The influence married voters have on elections is declining.
• The suburbs are the contested terrain.
• America's shifting class structure has reduced the white working class's political role.
• People are becoming increasingly likely to live close to those who look, act and think like them.

The discussion of married voters caught my attention:

Married voters typically vote solidly Republican and married voters with children even more so. But their representation in the national electorate is waning, as are some values to which these groups have traditionally been linked. According to Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center, two-parent families with kids at home were 23% of the population in 2006, down from 45% in 1972. The proportion of never-married adults rose to nearly a quarter of the electorate between 1972 and 2006, up from 15%. Overall, never-married, divorced, or widowed women are now a narrow majority of adult women, and unmarried households are now a majority of the nation's households. The growing, unmarried slice of the electorate is tilting Democratic.

That's a striking figure for "familied" couples with children. Married couple recently slipped to minority status in Census statisics on the American demography, but the number of married without children is pushing nearly 2 in 10 of the population.

Certainly that's an advantageous demographic trend for the Democrats, as those identifying as members of non-traditional family structures increasingly find themselves on the left side of the political divide.

I guess some of those Dayton housewives we might find'll be childless.