Race card

Meet Kevin Jackson, the black Tea Party activist disgusted at the prejudices of Obama’s supporters

Kevin Jackson talks a lot of sense. He also says things that make you wonder if your ears are playing up. As the newest star of the Tea Party circuit gives you his views on Obama, Palin and David Cameron, you repeatedly ask yourself, ‘Did he just say what I think he said?’

I am interviewing Jackson, a Republican blogger and author of The Big Black Lie, a critique of liberal America, because I heard him on US television saying that voting for Obama was racist. ‘They wanted the black president,’ he told Fox News. ‘Racists that they are, they voted for the man because he’s black, not because he’s qualified.’

There is no way Jackson, a national spokesman for theteaparty.net, could have got away with saying this if he were not also black, which might in itself be a racist situation. I ask him to explain himself. ‘Voting for Obama in the normal sense is not racist,’ says Jackson, who is speaking to me via Skype from his home in St Louis, Missouri. ‘The problem is the majority of the people who did vote for Obama were voting for him on one condition and that condition is he’s black and that is racism. My issues with Obama are that if you take colour off Obama’s resumé and look at his ability to run the country, there is no way he would have been elected. If Barack Obama were anything other than half black, if he were half Chinese or half Irish, there is no way on God’s earth that he would have got elected. He got elected based on colour and that is ridiculous.’

Most politicians would call it a day there, but Jackson is just getting started.