If Barack Obama does not ascend to the Presidency of the United States in November this year, it will not be because of his alleged lack of adequate experience. It will, quite simply, be because of his race.

Experience is, in any case, an overrated argument in American presidential politics. The U.S. does not operate a parliamentary system, where a winning party puts up one of its tried and tested veterans to be Prime Minister. Americans vote for an individual: it is his personal qualities, charisma, trustworthiness, and likeability that ultimately determines whether he (and so far it has always been a “he”) wins over a majority of the voters. As the election of George W. Bush testifies, national political experience is rarely a major criterion in the electorate’s eyes. Abraham Lincoln had less of it than Barack Obama does, and he didn’t turn out too badly. On the other hand, highly experienced national figures like Herbert Hoover are ranked amongst the White House’s most disastrous failures. If elected, Obama would not even be the youngest occupant of that address. It’s unlikely that lack of experience alone will be to blame if he doesn’t make it to 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue.

But the big question surrounding his candidacy has always been whether the United States of America was “ready” for a black President. Blacks who have previously run for the Presidency, like Jesse Jackson or Shirley Chisholm, were essentially protest candidates who never had a serious shot at their party’s nomination. Blacks account for 12 per cent of the U.S. population, but they have only produced three Senators, Obama included, in the last 140 years since the (post-Civil War) Reconstruction. The accidental ascension of David Paterson to the Governorship of New York this month, in the wake of a sex scandal, has just brought the total number of black State Governors in the same period to three as well. The problem was that most white voters tended to see black candidates as representing only the interests of their own people, and doing so quite often with a chip on their shoulder, acquired from years of accumulated bitterness at white American racism and discrimination.

The bias is still there

While the U.S. has moved on dramatically in recent decades from the segregationist era of “Jim Crow” and political or professional discrimination is truly rare and almost universally condemned, white voters have learned to conceal their biases but not to shake them off entirely. Thus public opinion polls often show black candidates for major office leading, but — as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley found when running for Governor of California, and North Carolina’s Harvey Gantt did in seeking his State’s Senate seat — when election day comes, their actual votes are five to 10 per cent less than the pollsters anticipated. Why? Because many white voters simply lied to the pollsters in order not to seem racist.

So when Barack Obama first announced his candidacy and began doing creditably in the polls, people privately imagined the “Bradley effect” would strike again, and his actual votes would fall short. But he didn’t, and once he won the Democratic Party primary in Iowa and surged elsewhere, American political pundits concluded that he had rewritten the rules. He had done so, essentially, by transcending race: by moving away from the traditional template of black politics forged in the civil rights era, in which black politicians asserted their community’s rights to special treatment, openly expressed their grievances against white America and clamoured for justice in terms calculated to appeal first and foremost to black pride and white guilt. Obama typified a post-confrontational style of politics exemplified in his historic speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in which he called for unity across the country’s various divides. He was the living embodiment of the American Dream: the son of an immigrant, brought up by a single mother, with black skin and a foreign name, who dared to aspire to lead the entire country. He was a black politician who was above black politics; talk of racism was absent from his discourse. The former Black Panther leader Angela Davis saw him as a symbol of colour blindness, “the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account.” Jesse Jackson even accused Obama of “acting like he’s white” — but then his appeal to whites lay precisely in the fact that he wasn’t predictably “acting black”. He seemed to represent a post-racial America, typified by the half-Thai, half-black golf super

Source: The Hindu