WHITEY HASN’T GONE AWAY

Now that my body clock is back to something like normal, after an electoral night the emotion of which overwhelmed me in a way I hadn’t wholly anticipated, here are some lingering thoughts on the Obama revolution.

Looking at the demographic breakdown is fascinating and instructive. White America remains profoundly conservative: only 43% of whites supported the Democrat as against 55% for John McCain but that is nothing new, only a one percentage point difference from 2004. It would have been fascinating to see how the white vote broke if, as was mooted at one time, Condoleeza Rice had been the Republican candidate or if Colin Powell had been prevailed upon to run in 2000.

Breaking in almost identical proportion was the Protestant vote, while white evangelicals voted three-to-one in favour of McCain. This too is resonant for I think it is fair to say that religion seems more attached to Obama than to McCain. Of course there was the deliberate diversionary tactic of the proposal that Obama was a “secret” Moslem but you didn’t have to dig very deep to find that his Christianity is of a noticeably more active kind than McCain’s. As Martin Kettle observed sharply in The Guardian, “the white churches are too often racial division’s best friends”.

Race is still a big factor in America’s image of itself. However creative, sensitive and embracing President Obama is able to be, there will remain millions who will not be reconciled. You can picture the good ol’ boy leaning on his picket fence, chomping on the chewin’ tobacco and vowing laconically: “He may be President but if he ever shows his face here we’ll run him outa town”.

Does the race issue cut both ways? Obama won 95% of the black vote, but the black vote is the most unswervingly Democratic of any demographic and Obama’s support was only five percent more than that given to Al Gore, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in elections of the past quarter-century. Interestingly, Bill Clinton was the Democrat who won the lowest proportion – 83% and 84% respectively in his two successful runs – yet Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning black writer, famously called him “the first black president”. Back in January, a CBS News poll gave Obama only 28% of the potential black vote against Hillary Clinton’s 52% at a time when Clinton was still widely expected to win the nomination. And again, you wonder how this split would have fared with a Rice or Powell candidacy for the Republicans. Which allegiance runs deeper, race or party?

Of course many blacks who voted for Obama have no more in common with him socially or economically than they do with McCain, and probably considerably less intellectually. That the candidates had advantages that large swathes of the electorate don’t enjoy only really began to tell when the financial crisis deepened and McCain’s tally of – he thought but he wasn’t entirely sure – seven homes played its alienating part. The strip cartoon Doonesbury, admittedly preaching to the converted, had some fun with the notion that McCain be obliged to “lose” one of his homes so that he could “feel people’s pain”.

There was some discomfort, expressed with trepidation in the media, about just how black Obama truly is, what with his white mother and grandparents. A column in January in the New York Daily News was headed ‘What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me’. In the same month, Joe Biden, still half-heartedly running himself for the nomination and having no way of foreseeing that he would duly find himself on the bottom half of the ticket, notoriously described Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”.

There will many who will not forget or forgive that. The deep, mellifluous rumble you hear is coming from the grave of Paul Robeson, as towering a figure as any in the 20th century in America, a man only prevented by the colour of his skin and the tenor of his times from achieving anything he set his mind to and "nice-looking" enough to have broken more hearts than Joe Biden would dare to dream of. And I won’t even mention Dr Martin Luther King. But Biden’s crass comment speaks to that subtext that Obama is not as truly black as those blacks who would never get entrée to the Democrats’ high table, men like Jesse Jackson (weeping freely in Grant Park, Chicago on Tuesday night, despite an earlier nasty dismissal of Obama) or Al Sharpton.

In exit polls this time, one voter in five said that race was a factor for them and more who said so voted for Obama than for McCain. Twice as many mentioned age and a large majority of them felt that at 72 McCain was too old rather than that, as a one-term senator, Obama was too inexperienced. Aside from the blacks and the (relatively) poor, Obama performed best among the young and first-time voters, seeing off McCain by at least two-to-one.

There is nothing to say that these demographics would not have favoured Hillary Clinton or any other Democratic candidate equally well, for it was the party as much as the Obama team that built and maintained the registration drive. Howard Dean was the candidate who, in the early months of the 2004 campaign, established the party’s reach through the internet and galvanised the party’s ability to raise funds. For almost four years, he has been the famously hands-on chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Obama owes a great deal of his victory to Dean’s organisational nous. Exit polls on Tuesday suggested that Clinton might have outpolled McCain by an even greater margin than did Obama.

It is idle of course to dwell on might-have-beens because if you change one ingredient you need to re-examine all. Had Clinton been the nominee, would McCain still have picked Palin? Would the GOP have been readier to let him go with Joe Lieberman, the Democrat renegade last seen in international profile as Al Gore’s running mate, on the ground that the (dis-)connection – Gore was her husband’s VP – would help to undermine Hillary, even if only obscurely? Could Hillary possibly have bettered Obama’s 56% of the women’s vote, given her hard-to-shake reputation as a divisive figure? And, in a nation where misogyny is every bit as immortal as racism, would McCain have won considerably more than his 48% of the male vote?

At bottom, it was hard not to feel that the factor that swung it most strongly for Obama was the one I, like the candidates, have failed to mention. That factor is George W Bush. Anybody following him under the same party colours would have been hobbled from the start. McCain made as insistent a case as he could that he was out of step with the neocons whom Bush fronted, but Obama had the vast advantage of lacking all taint of the Bush years. To his great and unexpected credit, the outgoing president has been as gracious and non-partisan as anyone could ask since the election and offered the president-elect congratulations and undertakings of support (both notional and practical) that seem wholly sincere. Perhaps, great reader that he is, he remembers Macduff’s line in Macbeth, that “Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it”, though of course Shakespeare meant “life” not “office” by that last “it”. Bush no doubt does remember how the Clinton team left a nasty taste by metaphorically trashing the place before leaving the White House.

Whatever the demographics demonstrate, imply or presage, Obama starts on a mighty task with more international good will than any president in modern times. He’ll need it. What goes up can soon come down, as the Scottish National Party found in yesterday’s by-election in Glenrothes. This was a sensational result, a bounce-back that absolutely nobody expected, not even the Labour party. Gordon Brown, who represents the neighbouring constituency and who broke with tradition by visiting the campaign twice while serving as prime minister, had been told soon after the polls closed that the seat was lost. This would have been in line with Glasgow East in July, where the SNP overturned a considerably larger Labour majority. Yet Labour not only held the seat, the party actually increased its vote since the general election by over 500 votes and its share of the poll by three percent. What contributed most to this victory, apart from the SNP not increasing its vote sufficiently, was the halving of the Tory vote and the vertiginous collapse of the Liberal Democrat’s support – both these parties lost their deposits.

I’ve said it so many times before and I’ll say it once again: a week is a long time in politics.