Michael Henderson suggests

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Letters

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Ms Thompson seems to think that Mr Obama is found, especially by white American males, to be ‘lacking in substance’ because they feel their manhood threatened and, it goes without saying, they are innately racist. But Obama is found lacking in substance because he is lacking in substance. As a 60-year-old naturalised American, who lived at least ten years on four different continents before settling on this one, I offer a couple of observations which I consider to be at least as scientifically rigorous as those of Ms Thompson. Firstly, there are more white male Americans who will vote for Obama because his father happened to have been a Luo from Kenya than there are those who will vote against him for that reason. Secondly — and perhaps understandably — black Americans in 2008 are far more racist than white Americans.

I will not vote for Obama, because of his naive and potentially destructive political views. It is deeply offensive to me that Ms Thompson would suggest this reasoning is ‘racist’.

Geoff Hawkins

Cary, North Carolina

Celtic cringe
Sir: Molly Watson (Style & travel, 23 February) begins by saying ‘Dylan Thomas used to say that a day away from Wales was a day wasted.’ Was this the same Dylan Thomas who said ‘Wales is the Land of my Fathers. And my fathers can have it’? Perhaps he meant that a day away from Wales is a day wasted, when one could instead have a week, a month, a year or a lifetime away? In this he seems merely to have been following in the great tradition of Celtic poets and writers such as James Joyce, who preferred voluntary exile to living in their rain-sodden native lands.

Ian Rippey

Northern Ireland