By choosing as their leader a man whose grandfather was a Kenyan goatherder and who shares a middle name with the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Americans have made it harder for their enemies to portray them as a nation of bigots, said The Observer in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
Until the moment victory was declared, the proposition that Barack Hussein Obama would become the 44th president of the United States seemed somehow remote. He was an unlikely candidate, partly because he lacked experience and partly because he spent much of his childhood abroad. But mainly because he is black.
It says much about the virtues of US democracy that Obama could even have been nominated. But it says much more about perceptions of American democracy abroad that so many doubts prevailed for so long about the final outcome. Opinion polls consistently gave Obama an unassailable lead. The incumbent Republican president’s personal ratings were at record lows. On every traditional measure, victory for the Democratic candidate was assured. But the world would not believe it until it saw it. Contrary to many predictions, race did not dominate the campaign. But it filled the gap between what Americans said they intended to do and what the rest of the world feared they would do. That anxiety played also on the minds of many US citizens. Precisely because every other factor pointed to victory for Obama, defeat would surely have indicated that American democracy had a color bar. It doesn’t.
