Tim Blair, writing in Australia's Daily Telegraph, makes some very provocative points about Barack Obama's slipping in the polls -- and this despite lavish and loving wall-to-wall coverage by the press....According to a piece this week by the US correspondent for The Age, Obama's poor polling is largely down to the racism of white Americans.
These would be the same people who rose up in outrage over the Bush administration's high-profile roles for black Americans Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Surprisingly, backlash from white American racists didn't see Bush voted out in 2004.
(Curiously, the same article mentioned - without criticism - that nine-tenths of black voters support Obama. Why don't those racists vote for McCain?)...
...The big problem for Obama isn't race. It's Iraq. Obama's greatest career accomplishment to date is that he wasn't elected to the US Senate when votes were taken to authorise the invasion of Iraq.
This subsequently allowed him to claim the peacenik high ground over the likes of fellow Democrat senator Hillary Clinton, elected at the time, and who was forced to confront reality - she voted to get in there and kill Saddam Hussein.
A year or so ago, Obama's anti-war stance was a vote-grabber; now, not so much. Iraq has stabilised to the point where a restaurant appropriating the KFC brand is safely operating in Fallujah, previously described (by US broadcaster CBS) as Iraq's most dangerous city.
This is a significant development for a candidate running on the peace ticket. Opposing the US presence in Iraq now means opposing peace...
