Michael Sokolove's article detailing how the racists of Levittown learned to love -- or at least prefer -- Barack Obama is a nice piece of work, but a bit confusing. The basic facts of the piece seem to be that three months ago, many Levittown Democrats were unsure whether they would vote for Obama. The reason they gave was race. Come election day, they quieted their bigotry and pulled the lever for the black guy. In other words, Democrats voted Democratic. The premise of the piece is that overcoming the hurdle of racism was a much larger feat than overcoming Kerry's elitist bearing or Gore's perceived pedantry, but at the end of the day, there's not much evidence of that, and in fact there's some evidence of the opposite (Obama, unlike Gore or Kerry, received a majority). Racism was supposed to have been an extraordinary objection against the Democrat, but increasingly, it looks to have been a relatively ordinary one, just another of the many opinions and biases and concerns and intuitions that play into an election, and that almost always are overwhelmed by partisan affiliation and macroeconomic concerns.
