Raphael Sonenshein

The state of Arizona has unleashed a firestorm with its new law to make undocumented status a state crime and to give the police wide powers to identify and detain those for whom there is “reasonable suspicion” of illegal status. Police will have the power to demand that anyone they suspect must “show their papers” and furthermore empowers citizens to sue local governments if they are not vigorous enough in implementing the law.

We all know that California is a blue state, with two Democratic senators and a record of favoring the Democratic presidential candidate in every presidential election since 1992. Barack Obama won California by more than 2 million votes. But the governorship has tended to be more red than blue.

It was a very strange sight. There in The Washington Post was an article by reporter Dana Milbank making a case that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s excellent advice has been ignored by a naïve President Barack Obama and that Emanuel is the great unappreciated asset of a collapsing administration with a weak staff. Several other stories followed with the same theme, including a laudatory column by right-winger Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, another article in the Post and yet another in The New York Times going off on the rest of the staff. While Milbank swore that Emanuel was not his source, it was obvious to anyone who knows how the Emanuel media network operates in Washington that the chief of staff’s “people” inspired this clumsy public relations blitz.

Barack Obama is suffering from an enthusiasm gap among African American voters. A recent survey by the political Web site Daily Kos found that 68 percent of white voters can be expected to vote in the 2010 midterm elections, compared to only 33 percent of blacks. At the beginning of December, the Congressional Black Caucus criticized the Obama administration for providing insufficient attention to the issues African Americans care about. This came even as Obama has been dropping in voter approval among whites. While Obama can still count on unified black support, the one-two punch of a lack of enthusiasm among African Americans and declining approval among whites represents a real challenge to Obama and to the Democrats. Fortunately, he seems to be holding steady with Latinos, the most dynamic new voting bloc.