Barack Obama on 'Is race a factor?'

Sen. Barack Obama talks about whether being a minority will be a problem referring to campaigning in Iowa. (Prior to the Iowa 2008 Caucus.) This interview took place on November 9, 2007, at Iowa Public Television. http://www.iptv.org/campaign08/ Glover: Senator, you are an African American candidate for President running in a state with a very, very tiny African American population. Can you get a fair hearing here? Are you getting a fair hearing here? Obama: I am getting a fair hearing and I will get a fair hearing and I think we're gonna win this place, because you have people who are less concerned about race and much more concerned about is this somebody who is really going to be fighting for me, is this somebody who is going to make sure that my life is a little bit better. I just had a roundtable discussion with a group of women. You listen to their stories -- you've got a single mother who is trying to go to school at the same time as she's working, just like my mother did. She can't even think about saving. She's not getting any help when it comes to day care because she works a little too many hours to get -- to get a subsidy. Stories like that exist all across Iowa. And if people feel that I can deliver for them, then I think we're going to do well. If they feel that, you know, I can make their lives a little bit better, the last thing they're going to be thinking about is my race. Glover: You think the state has moved beyond that? Obama: What's that? Glover: You think the state has moved beyond that. Obama: I do. Look, there's no doubt that race is always a factor in American society. There's no denying that. But I think we've made enormous progress in a generation, certainly since I was born in the early '60s, and I think that people right now are much more concerned with who's going to look out for them, who's going to fight for them, who's going to bring about the kind of change that's needed in Washington. Yepsen: So if you don't do well in the caucuses, we're not going to hear David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs and all your spinners telling us, well, Barack Obama didn't do well in Iowa because it's a lily white state? I just want to lay that down. Obama: Look, we have invested in Iowa. I have been campaigning actively in Iowa. We expect to do well in Iowa. Yepsen: What do you say, senator, to those Democrats who very quietly, because it's not easy to talk about race in politics, who say we're not sure Barack Obama can win because a lot of voters aren't ready to vote for a black man in America? Obama: You know, I heard this when I was running for the U.S. Senate. Illinois is 12 percent African American. It's not a majority African American state or even a substantial plurality African American state. And people said there's no way that folks down state are going to vote for you. And down-state Illinois is pretty similar to Iowa culturally and demographically. We ended up winning that primary by 20 points. We won the white vote. We won the rural vote. We won the farmer vote. There wasn't a vote we didn't win against strong candidates, one who spent $30 million, another who was the sitting state comptroller and was a very popular elected official, and we beat them. So I've heard this before. I think it gives the voters too little credit, and we're confident that we're going to be able to do well.