Hillary Clinton's White Male Problem

Kathryn Jean Lopez reports:

Hillary's man problem is not all Hillary's. It is a Democratic problem, one that has been previously obscured or ignored. Political observers have long been more interested in a supposed Republican gender gap with women. The reality of a woman running for president, though, has put a spotlight on the real gender divide. The Democrats have slowly and consistently been losing men.

In a Democratic Leadership Council study called "The White Male Problem," former deputy assistant for domestic policy under Bill Clinton, William A. Galston, identified the problem in 2000. Beginning with Great Society programs, he highlighted a series of factors that turned white males off the Democratic Party.

He writes, "By the 2000 presidential election, the majority of upscale white men came to believe that they needed nothing from government except to be left alone, while many downscale white men concluded that government either did not understand how to help them or did not care enough to do so. Because differing attitudes toward the role of government continue to define the left-right continuum in American politics, the rise of antigovernment sentiment among white men produced a shift toward ideological conservatism.

"And because the major political parties have become more ideologically polarized, this shift in white male sentiment led inexorably to a move away from the Democrats."

The problem is much older than Obama's political career. No Democratic candidate for president has won more than 43 percent of the white male vote since 1976.

What can they do? Galston advised, "In many respects, white men are looking for the same reassurance that the Democratic ticket failed to provide voters in the 1970s and 1980s, but successfully conveyed in the 1990s -- that Democrats share their values, look out for their economic interests and will stand up for America's role in the world. In 1996, that message helped Bill Clinton to carry white voters in the East and Midwest and to nearly do so in the West."

Hillary Clinton's explicit play for women, her tendency to rely on government rather than personal freedom and her insistence that the first thing she's going to do as president is start to move U.S. troops out of Iraq may not help.

The real gender gap.