Preparation for Obama
The talk of the historic events of last week when Barak Obama was elected as the first black president of the United States continue and many still are coming to terms with the facts.
Not only were the required Electoral College votes collected, the majority of the popular vote was also cast in his favour, perhaps preventing John McCain from claiming any degree of victory.
What is interesting though amongst all the talk of how the American people embraced the idea of a black presidential candidate and then gave him resounding affirmation are two occasions where we have seen this before.
What I am referring to are two occasions which spring to my mind where America has had a person from an ethnic minority background playing the role of president on television.
The two are the film Deep Impact where Morgan Freeman leads the world through a near apocalyptic meteor strike and of course the West Wing where Jimmy Smits runs as the Democratic Congressman for president.
In Deep Impact there was no obvious reason for putting a black person in that role other than to demonstrate that it could be done on television. In the case of the West Wing running a Latino candidate gave the plot some spice.
What it also did was to show how a candidate from within the ethnic minorities and from a major party could run for president without mentioning their own colour.
The main point of highlighting the two above cases was to state that in both the actors were portrayed a competent and intelligent.
The extent to which they altered the public’s perception of a person from an ethnic minority holding the office is unknown and can be tested subjectively at best.
I would conclude that the trial runs for Obama’s real life election did prepare the public’s mindset to some degree and made his path a walkable one.
To finish here without so much as a mention to the civil rights movement, those of all colours and stripes who made monumental sacrifices so that the recent events were even conceivable would be wrong.
The truth is that Obama’s victory was the culmination and many small and large events, media adoption and a good candidate.