(HOST) Barack Obama’s election has been widely hailed as historic. This morning, commentator Barrie Dunsmore, a veteran diplomatic correspondent for ABC News, puts that history into perspective.
(DUNSMORE) Last summer I was asked by the Vermont Human Rights Commission to make a speech about race in American politics. My mandate was to look at the role race had played in American politics from the first days of the Republic to the present. In 1965, I had worked in the segregated South and once had the privilege of interviewing Martin Luther King. I had a general idea of the history of racism, but before I began to delve into its details I did not have a true appreciation of just how profound and toxic that history was: from the irony of the Declaration of Independence that "…all men are created equal" – to what Barack Obama and others have referred to as "the original sin" of the Constitution. That’s the clause that counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person, giving slave-holding states a greater share of power; Jefferson probably wouldn’t have become President in 1800 if not for that so-called slave vote.
Then came the Civil War and the failures of Reconstruction – followed by a campaign of intimidation and murder in the South that created completely segregated societies for the next 90 years. Often it seemed that the South, not the North, had actually won the Civil War. Even after the Supreme Court found in 1954 that "…separate educational facilities were inherently unequal," and the historic passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 65, race remained a significant factor in American politics. It just went from being overt to covert – through the use of spreading fear of blacks and more sophisticated forms of black voter suppression.
Even during this latest campaign, the subject of race was never too far from the surface. The question repeatedly raised was, can Obama’s poll numbers be believed?
One person who chose to argue that there had been profound change in racial issues in America was Barack Obama himself. As a central part of his campaign strategy he went out of his way not to be seen as an angry black. He did not play the victim. And rather than decrying this country’s imperfections, he works at ways to make it a more perfect union.
If Obama had lost after having a commanding lead in the polls on the eve of the vote, I would have found it hard not to conclude that his color was ultimately what kept him from closing the deal with a majority of the American people.
However, as we know, Obama won – quite handily. And in exit polls it turned out that McCain’s age was a greater drag on him than Obama’s color. So now it will be possible to argue that the issue of race has been transcended because the biggest taboo in American politics has been broken. Race won’t cease to be a factor in Presidential politics, but it will no longer be a dominant one. That means that what happened last Tuesday was, indeed, a monumental event in the history of this country.