Righter than white
Updated on 26 October 2008
Felicity Spector looks at the one issue that everyone assumed would work against Barack Obama - race.
Latest news from Washington: John McCain, on today's Meet the Press - insists he's "doing fine", despite the polls. Others aren't so confident: former Bush speechwriter David Frum believes the disasterous McCain campaign will pull his entire party down with him - 'there is not a safe Republican seat in the country', he warns.
But lets look at one issue that everyone assumed would work against his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama: race.
It's not just that Obama seems to be sweeping all before him in states like Virginia - where former Republican senator George Allen made that notorious 'macaca' comment to an Indian American in his audience: - he's within the margin of error in Georgia, if not neighbouring Alabama - which only formally legalised interracial marriage eight years ago, and even then 41 per cent voted to KEEP the ban.
And despite all that, he's now achieved a historic standing among white voters.
No Democrat has won a majority of whites since LBJ: but now the latest poll shows 44 per cent are backing Barack. As Politico reports - Obama has cleaned up some 80 per cent of white working class voters - he's opened up a substantial lead among white Catholics - and he's splitting white independents pretty evenly with John McCain.
So what happened to the much vaunted 'white racism'? Sure, there's been that thinly veiled GOP message about 'real' America... that uniformed sherrif at a Sarah Palin rally referring again and again to 'Barack Hussein Obama' - Rush Limbaugh claiming Colin Powell's endorsement was "totally about race"... but beyond that - not so much actual evidence.
Back in September a poll by the AP and Yahoo showed a third of whites said they had 'negative attitudes' about blacks. But 58 per cent of those who admitted feeling negative still claimed they would vote for Barack Obama.
But aren't they just telling pollsters what they want to hear? What about all those people who just won't be able to cast their vote for a black candidate inside the privacy of the polling booth? Not so much evidence for that either, perhaps. Americans could just be more sophisticated, more mature than that.
In political shorthand, it's known as the 'Bradley effect' - after the LA mayor who lost the California governorship in 1982 largely because, it's held, he was black.
But last week's New York Times carried an op-ed by former Bradley campaign worker Brad Levin. He disagrees with the widely held orthodoxy: race was undoubtedly an issue, it's more complicated than that, he says. "he wasn't losing because of race, he was losing because of an unpopular gun control initiative and an aggressive Republican absentee ballot program" that generated hundreds of thousands of votes for his opponent. Bradley stood for inclusiveness, says Levin: not 'Us v Them'.
And, studies show that attidudes have moved on: look at races between 1996 and 2006 and black candidates tended to do better than expected, not worse. And as Frank Rich points out - "there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election."
Of course there's nothing reliable about opinion polls. But if elections are about momentum - and about the narrative of campaigns then Obama maintains his advantage. For all the fears about a race effect, it would be fantastic if America's diversity can finally triumph over bigotry, whatever the election result.
