Obama Still isn’t President in the South – Times Online

In the U.K., the reason for the rabid protests in the United States about Obama’s birth certificate are clear. The message is that Southern White Republicans still cannot accept that we have an African-American President.

Their unwillingness to accept the results of a democratically-held Presidential election transcends reason and implies that some “patriot” may try to overturn the results of the election through violence.

For some reason, the refrains of Neil Young’s “Southern Man” are going through my mind right now.

Here are excerpts from the story by Andrew Sullivan from the Times Online (emphasis mine):

A naive person might believe that Barack Hussein Obama was born, as he has long said he was, in Hawaii to a young American mother and a distant father from Kenya. There are notices in two local papers and the certification of birth is filed in the state of Hawaii’s records…

You may be persuaded. Once I’d seen the short-form certificate online, verified by independent journalists and vouched for by state authorities, I was, too. But staggering numbers of Americans remain sceptical. In fact, a majority of Republican voters — 58% — either do not believe or are unsure that Obama is a natural-born American citizen.

That means most Republicans believe Obama is constitutionally illegitimate in the presidency because the constitution reserves it for those born in America. The scepticism is — surprise! — concentrated in the south.

In Virginia, a southern state that backed Obama last year, only 53% are sure Obama is legitimately president and 70% of Virginia Republicans either don’t believe he is an American or aren’t sure. A poll last week also found that many Republicans believe this issue has not received enough media attention…

This is the silly season. But this silly story seems to me an indication of something more ominous. The demographics tell the basic story: a black man is president and a large majority of white southerners cannot accept that, even in 2009. They grasp conspiracy theories to wish Obama — and the America he represents — away. Since white southerners comprise an increasing proportion of the 22% of Americans who still describe themselves as Republican, the GOP can neither dismiss the crankery nor move past it. The fringe defines what’s left of the Republican centre.

The chilling implication is that a large number of Americans believe the president has no right to be in office and has fraudulently manoeuvred himself there.

I hope the secret service is on alert. If we thought racial panic had ended with Obama’s election, the resilience of this story in key parts of the country is a helpful wake-up call.

Obama still isn’t president in the south – Times Online.