Bernie Sanders has done surprisingly well in his campaign for president, much better than many observers expected when the openly socialist senator from Vermont announced in April that he was running.
But while Sanders has caused Hillary Clinton to shift noticeably to the left, his campaign has been vexed by a dilemma that has proven resistant to remedy -- lack of enthusiasm for Sanders among blacks and Hispanics.
It's gotten to the point where Sanders' supporters are grumbling among themselves and asking what can be done. If he were running as a Republican, the answer would be obvious and the matter settled -- the man is a racist xenophobe and that's why minorities are immune to his gruff, no-nonsense charm. But since Sanders is a socialist Democrat, it is equally obvious that he can't possibly be racist or xenophobic. What's the problem then?
Liberal radio host Thom Hartmann, an influential voice on the left, took a stab at what he sees as the root of the problem while talking with a caller to his show on Monday --
CALLER: My question is that, I noticed that Hillary Clinton had her town hall meeting at Claflin University, which is a HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). And when I was actually at a rally for Bernie Sanders, I was thinking, I said wow, you know if Bernie Sanders wanted to reach out more to the black community, then maybe that would be a route that he could possibly go, is to have a town hall meeting at a HBCU because, honestly, I felt like a chocolate chip out of the, you know, in the crowd that was there.
HARTMANN: Yeah, this is a major challenge that Senator Sanders has because Hillary Clinton and her husband have been in, you know, close to the black community for decades and very close to leaders in the black community. Their names are very well known among African-Americans and among Latinos too, the same thing. Bernie did a gig in Las Vegas apparently over the last couple of days and, you know, it was billed as outreach to Hispanics and, you know, there were a lot of white people showed up. So, you know, he's, and I think that that's probably because so much of his, uh, the technology used to get Bernie out nationally has been the Internet and the Internet overwhelmingly skews male and white.
Or at least it did, back in the early '90s before Hartmann slipped into that decades-long coma from which he recently awoke ...
If upon stirring from his extended slumber Hartmann had rubbed the sleepy dust from his eyes, he might have noticed that his anachronistic view of Internet use is badly in need of a digital upgrade.
This past June, the Pew Research Center released a study titled "Americans' Internet Access: 2000-2015" that demonstrates how far Hartmann is off the mark. Among the study's main findings --
84 percent of American adults use the Internet, up from 52 percent in 2000.
"Those with college educations are more likely than those who do not have high school diplomas to use the Internet. Similarly, those who live in households earning more than $75,000 are more likely to be Internet users than those living in households earning less than $30,000. Still, the class-related gaps have shrunk dramatically in 15 years as the most pronounced growth has come among those in lower-income households and those with lower levels of educational attainment."
"African-Americans and Hispanics have been somewhat less likely than whites or English-speaking Asian-Americans to be Internet users, but the gaps have narrowed. Today, 78 percent of blacks and 81 percent of Hispanics use the Internet, compared with 85 percent of whites and 97 percent of English-speaking Asian-Americans."
So much for Internet use skewing "overwhelming" white. But what about the second part of Hartmann's equation, that it also skews "overwhelming" male? Back to Pew for further illumination --
"Today, men and women are equally likely to be Internet users, a trend that has not wavered throughout the 15 years these surveys have been conducted."
The Pew study also points out that back in 1995, more than twice as many men as women had accessed the Internet -- while the, uh, overwhelming majority of Americans lacked access altogether --
"However, the earliest Pew Research surveys found that men were more likely than women to be Internet users. For instance, a 1995 survey found that 9 percent of men and 4 percent of women has used a "modem to connect to any computer bulletin boards, information services such as Compuserve or Prodigy."
If white male Hartmann remains convinced in the veracity of his contention despite solid evidence to the contrary, he might want to forgo further use of the 'net as a means of leveling the playing field for minorities. To paraphrase Gandhi, let the change begin with him.
