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.
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