Back when the polls were closer than now, a friend complained about the racist threat to the election of Barack Obama.
I asked for evidence and was told in so many words there just couldn’t be any other explanation besides racism for why Obama wasn’t ahead by a country mile.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that someone would assume a highly qualified moderate like McCain has no appeal to anyone outside the fact he is white and that Obama’s interventionist, spendthrift, redistributionist economic policies, his proposed timetable retreat in Iraq and his inexperience could not be factors weighing against him?
And yet far more people than this friend have succumbed to the thought that any opposition to Obama must be explained in terms of bigotry, and often go further. Many liberal commentators, politicians and others assume a few fringe whackos represent everyone with doubts about the candidate, sniff out anti-black innuendo in the most innocent of remarks, worry that people are lying to pollsters to hide their true feelings and overlook something spectacularly obvious.
That something is that Obama has already won the Democratic nomination against extremely tough competition, pulls tens of thousands of incredibly enthusiastic, mostly non-minority followers to his speeches, has raised more money from the public than anyone in presidential history and is leading in voter support right now in a number of regions that typically go Republican in these national contests.
You can’t dismiss the Obama lead in these places because some people supposedly confuse pollsters intentionally. There’s just no substantiating data to support the thesis of deception.
A number of experts quoted in the press have said as much, and a Wall Street Journal oped piece knocks down the idea that it was race that snuck up on Tom Bradley in 1982 gubernatorial contest in California, leading to his defeat.
The so-called Bradley Factor assumes Californians misled pollsters about supporting Bradley because they did not want to be seen as opposing a black candidate. The truth seems to be that his opponent was raising some mood-shifting issues at the end of the campaign and the press did not note that a gap in the polls was closing.
Throughout this year’s campaign _ even going back to the Democratic primaries _ some Obama supporters have read racism into virtually any criticism of the candidate, no matter how implausible.
The candidate meanwhile defended his own 20-year association with a minister who spouted anti-white racism, finally rejecting him when the embarrassment grew too great and evasions no longer worked.
Few would doubt that white racists can still be found in America, people who would never vote for a black for anything on one end of the scale, and others who might in fact vote for a black for president, but only with misgiving.
My contention is that these people are on the order of a molehill compared to the mountain that they used to be, and that the bigger story is that America has made absolutely extraordinary strides away from racism over the decades. We are now at a point where we seem close to doing something no one could once even have dreamed we would do _ elect a black as president.
But be sure that if we do, many will say _ in an argument that may in some instances reflect a kind of left-wing bigotry aimed at huge numbers of us _ that the margin would have been much greater except for anti-black sentiment.
And if McCain somehow manages to win, expect a deluge of furious claims that it was unquestionably racism that did this vile thing.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
