Why can't Obama be President?

* Poor GOTV among blacks/minorities by Team Obama?
* The venue ("white folks' place")?
* Blacks support Hillary?
* NW White Guilt/Lib Enchantment for the Underdog?

I honestly would be interested to know -- anyone have something remotely fact-based to explain this?

Also, isn't Iowa next to Illinois, which has a large African-American population? Maybe they came by. I dunno.

According to the State Data Center of Iowa, there are only 67,000 African-Americans in the state, which has about 3 million people. (2007 numbers) In Washington, there are 202,286 out of 4 million. (2005 numbers)

Hmmm....

If anyone was coming from Illinois, they would've gone to the event in Cedar Rapids.

Figured out who Greg Palast is yet?

First, the event in Iowa was free. It was a pep rally, a get out the vote rally, not a fundraiser. And it had Oprah. And although you don't mention it in your article, other press has said that people traveled from as far away as Florida to attend the Oprah/Obama show. A lot of the out-of-staters were black.

The Seattle stop was a fundraiser. The $100 ticket price probably stopped a lot of black people from coming. We may have a higher percentage of blacks in Seattle than in Des Moines, but they aren't necessarily any more able to afford the $100 ticket.

Bleachegh(spewing chunks)!!!

I take issue with your terms "another" and "inane." Let's take them one at a time, shall we:

ANOTHER -- This bespeaks the fact that Eli has posted regularly on the topic. How is this bad? Personally, I appreciate the fact that someone with Eli's intelligence and wit has elected (pun!!!) to cover the presidential horse race. So the fact that we see regular posts from Eli is no cause for alarm -- please sit back and take a few deep breaths. Which brings us to...

INANE -- Let's see...a link to the speech; insights into context of other Obama events in other locales; a focus on the dynamics of diversity within the Obama movement...what's inane about this? I see more pat cliches and lazy intellectual postulations in the main stream press -- I'm glad to have Eli, Josh and others that give the insights I cannot get anywhere else.

So unless you're able and willing to haul your keyster around the cornfields of Iowa -- let alone the backwaters of our own state -- give Eli a break and offer your views instead of your cheap insults.

Thanks.

I think the room reflected the Seattle population of folks that are comfortable with the Internet as a political communication tool.

We found out about this event via the Barack Obama web site and have been keeping on top of campaign events that way. The $100 price tag and way it was communicated are what I think contributed to the audience "diversity".

The event at Bell Harbor was not on the web site and, from what I can tell, not open to the public. I am guessing that however invitees were selected/communicated with for that event is what deteremined the makup of the folks attending.

Obama is very upscale and Harvard-y, is he not?

If it makes anyone feel better since we Seattlelites are apparently upset, there was a huge contigent of African-American leadership at Obama's appearance at Benaroya Hall last year. Longtime local African-American leader Tony Orange was inciting the crowd to chant for his presidency, in which the mixed crowd happily complied.

Who cares what Iowa looks like ... I don't.

You guys are so 20th century in your thining

The rest of your comment makes no sense except as a contrived excuse to attempt to bait people about "diversity" -- was that you @10, too?

my point is that there appears to be a few tacit assumptions running through a lot of the comments, in this thread and elsewhere, re: iowa and giving "rural white people" the first crack at deciding the candidates:

1] the political interests of non-rural and/or non-white people are more important
2] the political interests of rural white people are drastically different than anyone else’s
3] the only people in iowa are rural white people
and, implicitly...
4] rural white people are dumb

i grew up in a very rural, very white area, and i can assure you - none of these suppositions are necessarily true.

i was responding more directly to eli's comment about how "seattlites may not want to hear this," and other comments i've read on slog in the past few months that i find rather ignorant. so if it appears i'm coming from left field with this, well, i guess i kinda am.

personally, i find it rather disheartening that in 2007, people still think "diversity" is something you can glean from a photograph. or that the "flyover states" are an oasis of dumb, ambiguously white people, and seeing such photographs could be some sort of watershed moment where everyone's impression of middle america suddenly changes.

sorry, not trying to bait anyone. just calling it as i see it. again, not just from this thread, but a general impression i've gotten over the past few months. when people feel compelled to cite census data, or come up with explanations as to why there weren't as many black people at the seattle event as there could have been, in a word: disheartening. not sure if this is what kerri harrop had in mind, but the word sums up my impression.