Charles Kaiser on race and the American electorate

Can a black man be elected president?

As the estimable Dick Reeves pointed out in his column last week, underneath words like "working class whites" and "he can't close the deal," is the simple reality that some considerable number of Americans will never vote for a black person seeking the White House.

Knocking on doors in a Pittsburgh suburb before the Pennsylvania primary, it wasn't difficult to identify these citizens. "I wouldn't vote for him if he was the last man on earth" was a typical indicator—and the revulsion of two federal bag inspectors toward my Obama button at the Pittsburgh airport was hardly less obvious. (Though sometimes I think that in a visibly dumbed-down America, the aversion of many voters to intelligence is as big a problem as their racism.)

Despite Obama's calm and complete repudiation of what his former pastor said in a series of terrible, Oedipal appearances, the number of voters with a primary fear of the "other" has probably grown because of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's outrageous outbursts. Is that number now large enough to derail Obama's campaign? We won't know until the voters of Indiana and North Carolina render their verdicts next Tuesday.

As I have said since the beginning of the campaign, the chances of moving America to a higher place, where a brilliant black man could be elected president, still lie entirely with the Xers and the Millennials—the same people who put Obama on the electoral map in the first place with his stunning victory in Iowa.

These under-30s are the biggest reason to go on hoping that America could have a future in which liberty, and freedom, and color-blindness once again displace war, and torture, and know-nothingness as our primary national values.

The late Molly Ivins wrote, "It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." That struggle is a permanent one. The Xers and the Millennials have a genuine vision for a more perfect union. The question remains whether they will finally use their electoral power to make America live up to the principals it was founded upon.

Reporter: Richard Vanderford
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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.