Senator Obama and the Constituencies

It is said that one cannot argue with success, but in this commentary I will challenge that proposition. Despite being the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, there is something about the Obama candidacy that has been nagging at me. A lunch meeting with a woman friend of mine, followed by listening to a commentary by journalist Juan Gonzalez on “Democracy Now!”, pointed to the same problem: the Obama campaign is not paying significant attention to certain key constituencies.

While it is true that Senator Obama has constituency ‘desks’ in his campaign, he seems to have an anemic women’s outreach program. His campaign, while certainly trying to reach women, conceded the issues facing women to the Clinton campaign. This was a serious mistake. The fact that Senator Clinton is a woman should not have meant that a woman’s voice was absent from the leadership and message of the Obama campaign.

While Senator Obama came out on top of the primary races, there is a long distance and a relatively short time-period until we reach the goal-post on November. Nothing and no constituency can be taken for granted. Among other things, this should mean:

One thing the Obama campaign must keep in mind is actually quite simple: there are a lot of people in the USA who want a reason to NOT vote for a Black candidate. By ignoring the issues of various constituencies, he may provide the reason. By the same token, there are also millions of voters who wish to vote for Senator Obama because they want dramatic change. Ignoring constituencies is a time-honored method of saying, “…you don’t count…”