Race Over? The Atlantic
Monday, January 26, 2009 at 3:16PM
few days after the presidential election, as Barack Obama’s senior staff went into post-campaign hibernation, I logged onto my AOL Instant Messenger account at about 7:30 a.m. to find that David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, was one of the few live names on my buddy list.
Over the telephone, Axelrod can be opaque and cautious; online, he’s a little more direct. So I asked him about something I had noticed while reviewing the election results. Why had the Democratic presidential candidate underperformed relative to white Democratic statewide candidates in states such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Missouri? Why had a crescent of counties throughout the South and up through Appalachia blushed quite red?
“Do you think,” I typed to Axelrod, “when all is said and done, that racism was responsible for some of the states being as close as they were?” more
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