We media monkeys will look very silly indeed if President Obama behaves in the manner predicted of him by one lady voter I saw interviewed on TV. She said that as soon as he got in the White House he would ‘put on a turban and start shooting the white folks’. She was a McCain supporter, I believe, from somewhere like Toilet Duck, Arkansas. You have to hope that she’s wrong. The TV news programmes came up with a dingbat like her pretty much every evening, a little spurt of racism from Hicksville which will have had the effect of flinging a few more white votes the way of Obama as people recoil instinctively from bigotry and crass stupidity.
Race has not been a single factor in this election, it has been many factors. To hear the British correspondents talk you might think the only thing that mattered was the so-called ‘Bradley effect’, when a black Democrat was expected to win in California but did not do so because white voters switched at the last moment for reasons which were perceived to be racist. There will have been some of that, I suppose, this time around (especially among Hispanics in the Rocky Mountain states, it would seem). Meanwhile, the Republicans employed, from time to time, a racism-by-stealth strategy, Sarah Palin contrasting Obama with something she called ‘Real America’. And then there’s the little-remarked-upon racism of African-American voters. The Bradley effect would not occur to such an extent this time around, we were told confidently, because America had grown up and would not vote on racial lines.
Well, quite a lot of it did. Some 97 per cent of African-Americans voted for the black candidate and I think it is fair to surmise that many of them did so largely because of the colour of his skin.
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