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Note that the reporter omits to mention that Blacks voted 95% in Obama’s favor (a truly African score!). When Whites vote along racial lines, they’re being racist. When Blacks do it, they’re being progressive and the media piously applauds.

Race proves to be no discernible handicap, even among the small-town, working-class whites who were considered most resistant to Obama. Note the reporter omits to mention that Blacks voted 95% for Obama (a truly African score!). When White voters vote along racial lines, they’re evil racists. When Blacks do it, they’re being progressive.

Reporting from Washington — Beneath some of the sharpest assaults on
Barack Obama — that he consorted with radicals, that he condescended
to small-town Americans — was a lingering question: Would white
America help elect a black president?

On Tuesday, Obama rode a surge of support across many voter groups.
And white Americans played a major role in putting the first black
president in the White House.

Obama did not win a majority of white voters; no Democrat has since
Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But he ran equal to the last three Democratic
candidates for president among white voters, and even slightly better
than the party’s 2004 nominee, according to an Edison/Mitofsky exit
poll conducted for a consortium of TV networks and the Associated
Press.

Race proved to be no discernible handicap, even among the small-town,
working-class whites who were considered most resistant to the black
political newcomer from Chicago.

The force propelling Obama was clear: a troubled economy that had
gone from shaky in the spring and summer to frightening in the fall.
But in choosing an African American as the best person to lead in a
time of crisis, the nation’s voters have broken a number of long-held
truths about the hold of race on the country.

Racial antagonism still exists. But with Obama’s victory, voters
showed that such feelings no longer hovered over American politics as
they had for decades.

Most symbolic of that achievement was Obama’s victory in Virginia,
home to the capital of the Confederacy, where the candidate ended his
21-month campaign with a massive rally in Manassas, near the site of
one of the epic battles of the Civil War.

Breaking with recent assumptions, Obama showed that a single
candidate can appeal to black voters without losing whites, and to
white voters without losing blacks.

“The important question was not black or white but green. That is,
who was best to handle the economy,” said Peter A. Brown, associate
director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

“This is a guy who five years ago was in the state Senate, and
Americans decided to trust him with their country,” Brown said. “I
don’t think I’m being overly simplistic by saying these results do
demonstrate that racial attitudes have changed.”

Obama’s coalition cemented during one all-important week of the
campaign, in mid-September, when Wall Street financial giants began
to collapse and the stock market crashed — a week in which voters
still uncertain what to make of the young junior senator examined
their shrinking retirement accounts and dwindling home values and
decided to take a chance.

National exit polls Tuesday showed that nearly three-quarters of
voters disapproved of the job President Bush was doing. And the vast
majority of those Americans showed that they were ready for something
different.

By the time President-elect Obama addressed hundreds of thousands of
cheering supporters in downtown Chicago, it was hard to remember the
reasons why many once believed his candidacy was a long shot.

Opponents spread false Internet rumors that he was a Muslim, which
were supposed to scare off Jewish voters in Ohio and Florida. Some
speculated that Latinos would not vote for a black candidate. Or that
women, angry over the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton in a bruising
primary, would either vote for John McCain or stay home. Or that
young voters would not back Obama as strongly as his campaign had
hoped.

Election day told a different story.

Obama improved on past Democratic performances among all groups, with
the singular exception of seniors. He improved on 2004 nominee John
F. Kerry’s totals among Jews, Protestants and Catholics. While Kerry
split women’s votes with Bush, Obama won a decisive majority.

Moreover, Obama won the votes of 4 in 10 white men — higher than the
last five Democratic presidential nominees, according to a National
Journal study of exit polls — and nearly half of white independents.

Latinos, courted aggressively by both sides with Spanish-language ad
campaigns, went overwhelmingly for Obama. McCain, once popular with
Latinos, won 3 in 10 — a deep decline from the 45% won four years
ago by Bush.

Just as Obama helped expand the Democratic coalition — bringing with
him new U.S. senators and House members in Republican states from
Florida to North Carolina — Republicans now face a drastically
narrowed party.

Tuesday’s results show that Bush and McCain have left the GOP
appealing primarily to white conservatives at a time when Obama’s
ascension symbolizes the growing multiculturalism of America.

The African American share of the electorate, for example, grew
slightly, according to network exit polls. That was no doubt a result
of the excitement over Obama’s candidacy and a deliberate strategy by
his campaign to register new voters and contact blacks who had not
participated in the past.

Gone from the Bush win column of 2004 were two pivotal states — Ohio
and Florida — both of which boast growing ethnic diversity. In
greater Miami, an ethnic microcosm with large populations of blacks
and Latinos, Obama won by more than 140,000 votes — more than
tripling the Democrats’ edge there four years ago. In populous
Pinellas County near Tampa, Fla., where Bush and Kerry tied, Obama
won by 40,000 votes.

But the most reassuring numbers of all for Obama strategists may have
been the results among white voters — particularly those in working-
class areas and in key suburbs.

It was, after all, Obama’s controversial comments during the primary
referring to “bitter” working-class Americans that sparked doubts
about his ability to win their votes in the general election.

McCain’s campaign sought aggressively in the final weeks to
capitalize on Obama’s image as an elitist, pulling an obscure plumber
from Ohio into the headlines to paint Obama as a liberal who would
raise taxes.

But Obama carried mostly white Cambria County in western
Pennsylvania’ s coal country, and carried the county in Ohio that is
home to the old steel mecca of Youngstown.

Even in the coal country of southwestern Virginia, Obama minimized
his losses, perhaps thanks to his two visits to the region and a
swarming effort by the campaign to reassure skeptical whites that his
policies were better for their lives. As the president of the coal
miners union told locals repeatedly in recent weeks, they could elect
a “black friend” or a “white enemy.”

The Los Angeles (Calif.) Times
http://www.latimes. com/news/ printedition/ asection/ la-na-assess5- 2008nov05, 0,6354926. story