The Living Consequences

The New York Post, in its infinite wisdom, ran the cartoon shown here in today’s edition.

The illustration refers to yesterday’s shooting by police in Connecticut of an out-of-control chimpanzee, while the dialogue refers to President Obama’s signature legislative item, the stimulus bill which he signed on the same day.

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Recent news reports have publicized the fact that John McCain’s family owned slaves in the pre-Civil War South. As Douglas Blackmon related on the pages of the Wall Street Journal last Friday, Senator McCain’s great-great-grandfather owned a 2,000-acre plantation in Teoc, Mississippi where about 120 slaves labored in bondage.

Today at the Huffington Post, Abby Ferber explores the parallels between McCain’s story and that of the slave-trading DeWolf family, as chronicled in Traces of the Trade and Inheriting the Trade.

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Colin Powell, in his endorsement of Barack Obama moments ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, offered a bit of welcome honesty on the subject of our nation’s attitude towards those of other races and religions.

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As we’re all aware, the momentum of the presidential campaign has shifted significantly towards Obama in recent weeks. As of today, for example, Obama leads McCain in the national polls by as much as fourteen percentage points (53% to 39%), compared with gaps of four or five points as recently as a week earlier.

This is, of course, exactly what political scientists have been predicting, based on such large, external factors as the economic situation and the party currently in power.

The big questions now are whether Obama’s current lead in the polls will hold up over the next three weeks, and whether or not this lead is likely to translate into victory on Election Day.

This post won’t address the first question, which boils down to whether, and how, voter sentiment might change dramatically between now and November 4. Instead, I want to address the second question: how has Obama’s recent surge in the polls affected the map of the Electoral College?

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Senator Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, based on a conservative Associated Press tally of delegates.

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Few in the United States have taken the opportunity to acknowledge, much less to commemorate, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade in 1808.

For this reason, I was pleased to see that Senator John McCain gave a campaign speech on Wednesday in Michigan, in which he took the importance of the British and U.S. abolition of the trade as the jumping-off point for a focus on modern sex trafficking, child pornography, and other contemporary evils:

… the achievement of both countries in terminating the international slave trade and setting into motion the titanic and bloody struggle to close a shameful chapter in the history of our country [i.e., slavery itself] should be remembered as a turning point in mankind’s long and fitful progress toward a more just world.

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Ed Ball, the author of the award-winning Slaves in the Family and an early supporter of Traces of the Trade, has a fascinating essay at The Root, unpacking the slave-owning history of the Bush family.

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I want to offer up this passage by Senator Obama, on his racial and ethnic background and experiences, and implicitly, how he tends to view race and ethnicity in our society:

As the child of a black man and white woman, born in the melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who is half-Indonesian, but who is usually mistaken for Mexican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, I never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.

— Senator Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, p. 231

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