Les Payne, Newsday
- After voting heavily against the first black U.S. presidential candidate, the white majority in this country seems bent now on declaring Sen. Barack Obama’s victory as the end of racism in the republic.
As the world celebrates this historic ‘08 election, the media downplay the fact that were it left to whites alone, John McCain and Sarah Palin would be heading to the White House, accompanied, we assume, by Cindy McCain as first lady. Instead, pollsters and pundits seem hell bent on placing on the defensive those blacks and Hispanics who voted for Obama in record numbers.
Why else, goes the chortle, would African-Americans vote 96 percent for a black candidate other than for his race? This slander persists despite an estimated 85 to 90 percent percent tally in ‘64 for President Lyndon Johnson; book-ended with an 88 percent for John Kerry in ‘04. Blacks have voted virtually 100 percent for white candidates extending back through every presidential election in this ex-slave republic since they got the vote.
After first defending black voters against this “racism” charge, David Bositis, a respected numbers-cruncher for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, analyzed the white vote for the Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists visiting the capital last week.
