Reflections on class and race in America

Even by elementary journalistic standards, this headline is remarkable for its lack of any pretense at objective reporting. This is not a news headline. It is not how a mainstream newspaper normally presents the outcome of a national election.

In the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy repeatedly said that he was not the Catholic candidate for president, but rather the Democratic candidate, who happened to be a Catholic. His bid for the White House came only 32 years after a Catholic Democrat, Alfred E. Smith, was overwhelmingly defeated. Yet when Kennedy became the first Catholic in US history to win a presidential election, the press treated the religious question as a minor theme.

The Times, by contrast, chose to present Tuesday’s election entirely as a referendum on race—not a popular repudiation of the Bush administration and the right-wing politics of the Republican Party, not a repudiation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor of three decades of social policy single-mindedly devoted to the further enrichment of the financial elite. This interpretation ignores the indisputable fact that the most decisive issue in the election was the economic crisis, which prompted tens of millions of working people and youth, of all races, to vote for Obama in the hope that his election would signal a reversal of previous economic policies.

An array of pundits have taken to the airwaves to repeat the same racial mantra, and in their remarks on the election outcome Republican candidate John McCain and President George W. Bush similarly presented Obama’s race as the central issue in the vote.

More
http://wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/pers-n07.shtml