If you were watching the results of the Iowa caucuses on CNN last Thursday, you saw “the best political team on television” become downright giddy over Obama’s win over the rest of the Democratic field.

Obama won because he is inspiring, gushed the best political team. He is brilliant, he has the right message, he reaches out to young people, he reaches out to independents, he represents change, he walks on water, he is the messiah..

No guys, Obama won because he is black. More precisely, he won because he is a handsome, half black-half white politician who avoids off-putting Jesse Jackson-style racial rants.

The CNN crew, however, not only failed to grasp that Obama is the leading contender for the Democratic nomination because he is bi-racial, the crew, in every one of its numerous references to Iowa’s “overwhelming” whiteness, spoke of it as if that whiteness were actually an obstacle to Obama’s victory.

Obama’s blackness is an asset. A comparison of the states by the racial makeup of each state measured against the political contributions from that state by candidate shows that the whiter the state, generally, the better Obama’s fundraising relative to the other candidates.

In the two whitest states in the country, Maine and Vermont, Obama is the leading fundraiser. He was also number one in North Dakota (6), which is just about as white as overwhelmingly white Iowa (5). In fact, along with the eighth whitest state, Kentucky, Obama is the number one fundraiser in four of the ten whitest states in the country (Mitt Romney also leads in four, and John Edwards and Chris Dodd lead in one each). Obama is second in another four of the ten whitest states (Hillary Clinton is second in another four, and Ron Paul and Mitt Romney are second in one each).

Moreover, four of the five states in which Obama’s fundraising has been worst relative to the other candidates–Arizona, Alabama, Louisiana, and Nevada–are also among the least non-Hispanic white: 42nd, 31st, 38th, and 44th respectively. (The most recent data available from the Federal Election Commission are from Oct. 29, 2007, before the current wave of Obamania set in.)

But with the exceptions of Representative Steve King of Iowa and the invaluable Steve Sailer, no one I know of is questioning the we-shall-overcome subtext of Obama’s victories.

I’m White. I’m Not OK.

Obama’s ascendancy is due, in part, to the desire by many whites to assert their individual moral goodness. The best illustration of how this works is an incident I witnessed when I was 18 years old.

I attended high school in a Nebraska town of 16,016. Among the 350 or so in my graduating class, there wasn’t a single Asian, a single Latino, or a single black student.

We were exceedingly white, and exceedingly tolerant. I would not have been able to tell you which of my friends were Catholic, and which were Protestant. A girl I once took out on a date was very likely Jewish, but it was years later that that possibility dawned on me. A kid a year behind me was openly gay, as a result of which he was invited to address different Social Studies classes as such. Racial tolerance was universal and unquestioned, albeit it in the complete absence of any opportunity to apply that tolerance.

During my senior year, my home town got a McDonald’s—just like a big city! For months after it opened, it was easily the most popular place in town. During our lunch period one day, the McDonald’s was mobbed as usual; every cash register had a line of 8-10 people waiting patiently to place their orders. Then a black man walked into the restaurant and took his place at the end of one of the lines. The cheerful young blonde girl taking orders behind the counter leaned forward. Addressing the black guy, and waving him to the front of the line, she asked, “May I take your order, please?”

The black guy was apparently familiar with that part of Nebraska. As if it were the most normal thing in the world, he simply stepped to the front of the line and placed his order.

Now, why did the white counter girl act in that really strange manner?

White Americans who grew up in that time and in that place imbibed much of their culture, and, therefore, much of their self-identities, (especially concerning race, since their parents quite frequently could provide no deeper context) from decades of cultural events like the TV-movie Roots. A white American in such circumstances grew up, in other words, congenitally guilty of racism—the worst of the modern sins. The decent ones, i.e., almost all them, were eager for opportunities to atone.

Those opportunities are rare in Nebraska, the 14th whitest state in the country, and one of ten sending more money to Barack Obama than to any other presidential candidate.

The Future Is Destiny

A second force behind Obama’s ascendancy is his ability to communicate the future. He is the embodiment of the 1993 Time cover story, “The New Face of America,” which explored “How Immigrants Are Shaping the Worlds First Multicultural Society.”

The cover featured a “computer composite” of a future American, meant to be a blend of the racial groups in proportion to their projected representation in the population. The woman was beautiful, natch, and in the letters to the editor section in the next issue, the rapturous outpouring included such excesses as one man declaring his undying romantic love for the computer graphic.

This blended future has a powerful appeal to a great many people— an appeal that cuts across racial lines. To another very large, multiracial group of people, however, that blended future is as powerfully repellent.

The breach between these two groups looms menacingly ahead. But the blended future of the first group has the patina of inevitability, since that seems to be the direction in which we are already headed. It also offers the enormously alluring hope of blending away the divisions between us peacefully and avoiding the awful possibilities inherent in the social fault line all humans sense beneath us.

Here’s a table that compares the racial makeup of each state with the political contributions from that state by candidate.

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