End of 'American exceptionalism'?

The End of the American Exception

Economically speaking, America could soon be more European than Europe

By Clive Crook
March 5, 2008 | TheAtlantic.com

That the United States stands apart is something Americans and Europeans have agreed on for a long time. It goes back to Tocqueville, like most things. Many of the differences of character and culture he noted in the first half of the 19th century are still there, no doubt, but some more recent contrasts are looking questionable. Since 1945, American exceptionalism has been asserted with particular confidence—but gradually diminishing validity—in economic affairs. America is to Europe as private enterprise is to the public good, as selfish individualism is to social partnership, as "compensation" is to work-life balance. Modern America has limited government, weak unions, high-powered incentives, capitalism red in tooth and claw. Post-war Europe has tax-and-spend, transport strikes, six-week vacations and the welfare state. Or so, on both sides of the Atlantic, we fondly imagine.

Living in the U.S. for several years after decades as a restless Brit, I continue to be struck by two things. First, this idea of rival economic paradigms appeals to both audiences: Neither would have it any other way. This may be why the notion persists so tenaciously, despite not being true. That is the second thing. Caricatures are well and good, but this one is just too much. In economic matters, America is far more like Europe, and Europe more like America, than either cares to admit. Moreover, the differences continue to shrink, and the pace of convergence seems about to accelerate. We will see whether the idea of America as the land of uncushioned capitalism—the timid and work-shy need not apply—will outlast a faster approach to the European norm.

The Democrats' promise of comprehensive health reform—something the country finally seems to want—is what prompts this line of thought. Over the past ten years, it seems, many Americans have come to think it wrong that a country as rich as theirs fails to guarantee access to health care. For much longer, almost all Europeans have thought it both incomprehensible and shameful. This is America's biggest social-policy exception (unless you count capital punishment as social policy). And it is marked for abolition.

Universal health care, if it happens, will be an enormous change in its own right, of course, but also one with further implications. It is going to push taxes up—in the end, possibly way up. The plans lately under discussion have not been properly costed, but figures of $50 billion to $75 billion a year in extra spending—the sorts of numbers bruited for the Democrats' proposals—are optimistic. Beyond the initial outlay, whatever that proves to be, is the likelihood that people will gradually migrate (at their own initiative, or more likely at their employers') from private insurance schemes to the new (and presumably subsidized) public alternatives. Everything depends on how the system is managed, but it is easy to foresee, in the fullness of time, a far bigger increase in the cost to taxpayers than the current plans envisage. And if American health care coverage and financing get more European, American taxes will have to as well.

"Europe" is a gross simplification, so think about Britain—which continental Europe regards as a mid-Atlantic offshoot of the United States—and, say, the Netherlands. U.S. taxes are 27 percent of national income, British taxes are 37 percent, and the Netherlands' are 39 percent. Recall that America spends fully 10 percentage points of national income more than Britain on health care, public and private combined. Suppose the bulk of the existing costs of U.S. health care eventually migrated to the public sector, and nothing else changed, American taxes would have to approach or exceed British and Dutch levels.

That is a worst-case scenario, no doubt, for believers in "vive la différence" And health spending, however important, is still only one category of social spending. America will continue to spend less on other social programs than is usual in Europe, you might think. In fact, the differences are exaggerated. Roughly speaking, Britain and the Netherlands spend about ten percentage points more of their national incomes on taxpayer-financed social spending. But if you allow for the higher taxes that Europeans pay on their benefits, and for cash-like tax reliefs that the United States freely uses to advance social goals, the difference shrinks by nearly half. This, to repeat, is before the Democrats' have done their health reform. And it is before they have taken up any of their other proposals to improve the country's safety net, through more comprehensive trade adjustment assistance and other kinds of help for displaced workers, or to expand other social programs.

If you look at other aspects of the American economic exception, you see something similar: Transatlantic differences have narrowed already, and the trend is more of the same. Consider regulation of business and finance. Few seem to question that the weight of regulation is less in the United States. In one area, anyway, this is true: Worker protections are weaker in America than in Western Europe, where employers are far less free to fire at will; and the floor that the minimum wage puts under incomes is lower here than there. But think about product-safety regulation, or environmental regulation. Think about the FDA. In many areas, America regulates its businesses at least as tightly as Europe.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration did make a serious attempt to deregulate parts of the economy. Particular industries, notably banking and the airlines, were transformed. In other cases, such as the utilities, it was not so much a case of deregulating as replacing one scheme of regulation with another. But these were exceptions to an ongoing trend of regulatory accretion, and in some cases, accretion is putting it mildly. On regulation of corporate governance, Democrats are still calling for stricter rules—and given some of the recent abuses, not without reason. Yet, since Sarbanes Oxley, American financial and corporate regulation has been probably the most stringent and complex in the world. Personally, and I speak admittedly as a resident of the District of Columbia, I find the encompassing multi-jurisdictional tyranny of inspectors, officers, auditors, and issuers of licenses—petty bureaucracy in all its teeming proliferation—more oppressive in the United States than in Britain, something I never expected to say.

The unions are weaker here, it is said. To be sure, they have fewer members as a proportion of the workforce than in Britain, or (even more so) continental Europe. This is something else, of course, that the Democrats say they want to fix. Their proposed card-check legislation is expressly intended to slow and reverse the decline in union membership. This is a goal which few European governments would any longer think to embrace. In Britain it would be regarded as crazy, partly because Britain's unions, at the zenith of their power in the 1970s, before Margaret Thatcher, were keen to confront not just employers but elected governments as well.

Qualitatively, if not quantitatively, American unions remind me of the old-fashioned British kind. They seem anachronistically angry and assertive. Reform education? Impossible: the teachers' unions will not hear of it. Barack Obama is called brave merely for uttering the words "merit pay" in their presence. See what America's unions have done to the auto industry. The Writers' Guild just shut Hollywood down for several months. I cannot think of a British union that any longer has that kind of muscle, or would think of exerting it if it did. In much of the rest of Europe, unions have become a quietly co-operative part of management more than militant champions of workers' rights.

It would be wrong to say that the European idea has "won." Attitudes, it seems to me, remain an ocean apart: America still salutes effort, ambition, self-reliance and success in a way that is utterly unEuropean. And in recent years, remember, the distance between America and Europe has narrowed from both sides. Europe's governments have tried hard to cut taxes, spending and regulation. They have had only modest success, it is true; nonetheless, there has been movement toward "American-style capitalism", as it is still called. In the United States, the movement has been the other way—and with Democrats expecting, plausibly, to add the presidency to their control of Congress next year, there is more to come.

Could the lines even cross? Could America ever become more European than Europe? It seems unlikely, but not unthinkable. The Democrats, taken at their word (which would be rash), seem to be proposing exactly that. Elements, at least, of the programs outlined by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during their nomination contest are significantly to the left of where Britain's Labour Party, post-Thatcher, post-Blair, now stands. (Think about that.) But let us suppose, less adventurously, that American capitalism and Europe's social market merely continue to approach each other in the center. For good or ill, the era of the American economic exception is coming to an end.

Muslims hate our foreign policies

While I don't agree with Scheuer on everything -- most important, I don't agree that Muslim extremists pose an existential threat to the United States -- he is correct that Muslim extremists hate America for its actions, not for its "freedom." Until we accept the truth that popular Muslim hatred is blowback from U.S. foreign policies, we will never be able to stem the tide of extremism.

And it only further enrages Muslims when Bush -- whose "freedom agenda" for the world's oppressed peoples figured so highly in his speeches, and was a major reason (proclaimed ex post facto) for his invasion of Iraq -- picks & chooses which democracies he (i.e. America) will recognize as legitimate. If democracy for the world is our goal, then we must accept the results of free & fair elections everywhere, no matter who gets elected.

Hypocrisy never makes for good foreign policy
By Bernd Debusmann
March 7, 2008 | Reuters

It would be hard to believe if it didn't come from the man who ran the unit charged with capturing Osama bin Laden.

Preparations at one point included lawyers from several branches of the U.S. intelligence community. Their task? "To examine rolls of masking, duct and medical-adhesive tape and determine which had the right amount of stickiness to ensure that bin Laden's face and beard would not be excessively irritated if his mouth had to be taped shut after capture."

This comes in a footnote in an angry book by an angry man, Michael Scheuer, a 20-year veteran of CIA covert-action operations who left the agency in 2004 and became a vocal critic of what he sees as the failure of successive U.S. administrations to take seriously the threat of Islamic terrorism.

The beard-and-tape episode dates back to 1998 when, he says, "CIA engineers were required to produce an ergonomically correct chair for bin Laden to be seated in after he was captured. Likewise, well-padded restraint devices were manufactured to avoid chafing his skin."

So much for the ruthless, brutal, cold-hearted officials of popular lore.

The operation was called off because the Clinton administration feared a huge backlash if bin Laden had been killed by accident in the attempt to snatch him.

Also at play, according to Scheuer, was "the first question always asked by the agency's senior-most managers, 'Will it pass the Washington Post giggle test?' " He added that no "operation could be considered if the Post and other media would ridicule it if it failed and became public knowledge."

The giggle test, Scheuer says, was applied throughout his service with the CIA, which included arming Afghan mujahedeen in their fight against Soviet occupation. He was one of the architects of the CIA's controversial rendition program under which Qaeda suspects are seized and taken to third countries.

Bin Laden is still on the run, more than six years after hijackers under his command rammed airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people.

In his recently published book, "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq," Scheuer argues that the United States faces more trouble because its leaders refuse to recognize what drives terrorism.

President George W. Bush argues that terrorists "hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote." But polls show that the bedrock of support for militancy among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims is the detestation of U.S. foreign policies.

Scheuer faults U.S. leaders for failing to acknowledge the grievances that bin Laden laid out in precise detail, which were adopted by the followers he inspired. They were: (1) the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula; (2) unqualified support for Israel; (3) U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India and Russia; (4) U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil; and (5) U.S. support and financing of authoritarian Arab regimes.

There is no reason to believe that the United States is about to change the foreign policies that motivate Muslim extremists in a region where politics and religion are intertwined and where many believe that the "war on terror" is really a war on Islam.

Foreign policy has not been much of a subject in the U.S. presidential election campaign. The candidates differ over when and how to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them has given any indication of policies that would take the air out of the arguments that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups have used to attract recruits.

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and the rivals for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have all pledged commitment to Israel and none of them is likely to loosen Washington's embrace of Saudi Arabia or push President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt toward greater democracy.

Polls show that radicals - potential suicide bombers and hostage takers - and moderate Muslims are in favor of moving toward more democracy, a process stifled in many places by authoritarian rulers who enjoy the backing of the United States.

America cemented its reputation as the superpower of hypocrites after one of the very few democratic elections in Middle Eastern history, the 2006 vote in which Palestinians opted for the Islamist party Hamas over Fatah, the corrupt ruling bureaucracy built up by Yasser Arafat. The closely monitored election was deemed free and fair.

The United States responded by boycotting Hamas and backing Fatah.

Al Qaeda can't conquer anything

I've said all of this before, but since nobody listens to little old me....

Iraq Will Not Be Qaedistan
By Olivier Roy
March 7, 2008 | International Herald Tribune

One of the key questions in the U.S. presidential race is what will happen if U.S. troops leave Iraq.

Of course nobody knows for sure. But I can say this: Al Qaeda will not take power and establish an Islamic state.

Too many in the West persist in seeing Al Qaeda as a territorialized Middle East organization bent on expelling the Christians and Jews from the region in order to create a "Dar al-Islam" (land of Islam) under the umbrella of a caliphate.

Al Qaeda is not a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or Hezbollah. It is a non-territorial global entity which has never tried to implement an Islamic state, even in Afghanistan, where it found sanctuary in the 1990s.

It is pointless thinking of Al Qaeda as a political organization seeking to conquer and rule a territory. Al Qaeda recruits among disenfranchised youth, most of them without direct connections with the embattled countries of the Middle East.

Second-generation Western Muslims, converts, Saudis, Egyptians and Moroccans make up the bulk of the Al Qaeda traveling jihadists - not Afghans, Palestinians or Iraqis. Al Qaeda does not have the necessary local rooting for taking power.

Al Qaeda's strategy is first to to confront the big boys - or rather the big boy, the United States - directly, relying not on the actual damage inflicted (financial cost, number of dead) but on image, media impact and the terror effect.

The mirror effect of those who claim a clash of civilizations, of course, intensifies the impact. In fact, Al Qaeda needs those who demonize it, because it makes it what it is not: the vanguard of the "Muslim wrath."

Al Qaeda goes where the Americans are while the U.S. Army goes where Washington thinks Qaeda might be . . . one day.

Secondly, Al Qaeda seeks to hijack existing conflicts and make them part of the global jihad against the West.

However, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and now Iraq, the Islamist internationalist groups have been unsuccessful in diverting local and national conflicts, playing only the role of auxiliaries. The key actors of the local conflicts are the local actors: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the different Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups are not under the leadership of Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda has managed only to implant foreign volunteers into these struggles, volunteers who usually do not understand local politics and find support among the local population only as long as they fight a common enemy, such as American troops in Iraq.

But their respective agenda is totally different: Local actors, Islamist or not, want a political solution on their own terms. They do not want chaos or global jihad. As soon as there is a discrepancy between "the policy of the worst" waged by Al Qaeda and a possible local political settlement, the local actors choose the local settlement.

The Bosnians got rid of the radical foreign fighters once they achieved their independence; the Taliban rank-and-file refused to die for Al Qaeda when the Western forces landed in Afghanistan after 9/11.

In Iraq, many among the Sunnis, including the Salafists, resent not only Al Qaeda's tactics of indiscriminate suicide bombings, but also the strategy of confronting the Shiites.

The fact is Al Qaeda plays a role in the deterioration of the conflicts but is unable to succeed in coordinating them. Local, national, tribal or sectarian religious channels are stronger.

Al Qaeda may recruit some local organizations, acting within a limited area or linguistic region, with their own history. These groups then claim affiliation with Al Qaeda. They are to be found in Indonesia (Jemah Islamiyya); in the northern Sahel (the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which in January 2007 changed its name to the Al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb); Northern Lebanon (third-generation but still uprooted Palestinian refugees); in the Sunni triangle of Iraq (with the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group); and in Saudi Arabia and Yemen ("Al-Qaeda Organization in the Arabic Peninsula").

But these organizations do not need Al Qaeda in order to recruit or operate. If they have rallied to it, it is because they have difficulty in defining or achieving a local objective (an Islamic state, for example). They become globalized therefore by default.

In short, there may be good reasons for the United States to remain in Iraq, but they have nothing to do with Al Qaeda; they have more to do with a damage-control operation. If the U.S. troops leave, there might be a civil war, there might be a growing Iranian influence, Iraq might be turned into a battlefield by proxies between Saudi Arabia and Iran. There could be a Sunni-controlled area, a Shiite state and an independent Kurdistan, but no Qaedistan.

It would have been better to concentrate the Western forces on Afghanistan, which has been the real cradle of Al Qaeda. If only part of the brains and armor devoted to the "surge" in Iraq had been devoted to Afghanistan, instead of the incessant turnover of disparaged NATO troops with little knowledge of the country, things would have been better.

But in Afghanistan, as anywhere else in the greater Middle East, there is no military solution, only a political solution by dealing with the local actors, and dropping the senseless idea of a "global war on terror."

Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, is author of "Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah" and "Islamist Networks: The Pakistan-Afghan Connection." A Global Viewpoint article.

Opportunity cost of Iraq's $2-3 trillion price tag

If death, destruction, and misery don't bother you, then maybe this ($$$) will....


The $2 trillion nightmare
By Bob Herbert
March 4, 2008 | International Herald Tribune

We Americans have been hearing a lot about "Saturday Night Live" and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more.

There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war - not just the cost to taxpayers - will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. "For a fraction of the cost of this war," said Stiglitz, "we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more."

Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put "on a more sustainable basis." And he cited the committee's own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

What we're getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war.

These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.

Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first Gulf War, which lasted just one month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.

"Imagine then," said Stiglitz, "what a war that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at VA hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems."

The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through "emergency" appropriations that get far less scrutiny.

Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by.

Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Bilmes called "The Three Trillion Dollar War," said they had to go to veterans' groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.

Stiglitz and Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

"Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war," Hormats told the committee. "Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good. . . And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War."

Said Stiglitz: "Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits.

"The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself. . . By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion."

Some former presidents - Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower - were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century.

That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of the campaign.

It's a new era.

Obama's race doesn't matter?

I'm not quite as hopeful as the Thernstroms when it comes to white voters' new willingness to vote for black candidates. But I do believe Obama's campaign represents a big step toward equal consideration of black candidates.

My personal view is that Obama is an exceptional black public figure. He is the male Oprah: Just as suburban white women feel better about themselves for loving Oprah, so do white voters feel proud of themselves for supporting Obama. But people don't love Oprah or Obama first for their race; they love them for their personal traits and what they represent. Their race is secondary, but still very important: guilt-ridden whites are eager for opportunities to embrace "worthy" blacks.

As I've argued for more than a year now, if Obama wins, we are much closer to a day when a candidate's race doesn't matter as much as his message. We ought to elect a black president simply to dispel the myth of its impossibility. This myth looms large in the psyche of whites and blacks alike.

Ironically, a win for Obama would help Republicans in the long run, by eroding political and judicial support for "majority-minority" districts, and public support for Affirmative Action-type remedies to racial discrimination. Look, they'd say, Obama is living proof that Affirmative Action and gerrymandering of districts along racial lines is no longer necessary. (This is my bet for the topic of Rush Limbaugh's opening monologue the day after Obama is elected).


Is race out of the race?
White voters' support for Obama suggests a dramatic change in the electorate.

By Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom
March 2, 2008 | Los Angeles Times

One of the most notable -- yet unremarked-on -- lessons of this year's Democratic presidential nominating contest is the demolition of the long-held belief that whites simply won't vote for black candidates for higher office. Before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, who could have predicted the remarkable outpouring of white support for Sen. Barack Obama?

As recently as 2006, when Congress held hearings on the renewal of the expiring parts of the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates delivered a united message, echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. "It is rare that white voters will cross over to elect minority preferred candidates," the committee's report concluded -- a statement from which there was no congressional dissent.

The 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, it seemed, were living proof of this. Overwhelmingly, they had been elected in "majority-minority" districts drawn specifically for African American candidates; only a handful had been elected in districts in which most voters were not black or some combination of black and Latino.

So it's not surprising that, as the 2008 presidential race got underway, many observers -- white and African American alike -- thought Obama's chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very poor. Robert Ford, a black state senator in South Carolina, for instance, told a Time magazine reporter in January 2007 that "Obama would need 43% of the white vote in some states to win, and that's humanly impossible." Southern blacks "don't believe this country is ready to vote for a black president," he added. Jesse Jackson argued that "a white female has an advantage over a black male." And after the first three contests, political scientist Philip Klinkner was ready to say that there was a "ceiling" on white support for Obama of about 35%.

Polling data suggested otherwise. In 2003, for instance, only 7% of Americans said they were unwilling to vote for a "qualified African American candidate," according to a Gallup Organization survey. But many analysts refused to believe such polls, preferring to note racism's long history in American politics or to suggest that white voters were not telling the truth to pollsters.

After nearly two dozen primaries, we now know beyond dispute that the pessimists were wrong. Obama won the majority of white votes in Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, and he received extremely high vote totals among whites in the other states he's run in as well.

Forget, for a moment, about white women, many of whom have been drawn to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton through a strong sense of sisterhood. Look instead at white men. In a remarkable number of states, according to exit polls, Obama won more than 40% of the white male vote. Those states included Clinton's home state of New York (where Obama got 43%), Arizona (45%) and, most remarkably, the Deep South state of Georgia (46%). Indeed, in Connecticut, New Mexico, Illinois, California, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin, his support from white men was in the quite amazing range of 56% to 64%.

What's more, Obama would probably have won similar levels of support from white female voters -- if he hadn't ended up in a race against a woman. After all, there's no evidence to suggest that white women are less likely to vote for an African American candidate than white men are. If Clinton weren't running (and pulling away votes based on her gender), there's no reason why Obama's numbers among white women wouldn't be as high as his numbers among white men.

The numbers above, of course, do not reflect the entire American electorate. These primaries have been held mostly among Democratic voters, and we don't yet know how Republicans will respond when faced with an African American candidate. Still, the numbers suggest that something has changed dramatically, and that it may be time to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about voters and race.

The Voting Rights Act, 43 years after its original passage, still calls for the creation of majority-minority districts in order to encourage the election of nonwhite candidates. In 1995, awaiting a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of racially gerrymandered districts to ensure minority office-holding, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's Ted Shaw warned: "If we lose these cases, the Congressional Black Caucus will be meeting in the back seat of a taxicab." Rep. Mel Watt, a black Democrat from North Carolina, took the point a step further. "Without these districts," he said, "you're not going to have minority representation in Congress. It's just that simple."

But even then, it wasn't "just that simple." And indeed, when the court struck down the Georgia race-based district in question as unconstitutional -- a geographical "monstrosity," said the court -- African Americans still did very well in the newly configured districts. The Congressional Black Caucus does not meet in a taxicab; it is stronger than ever.

Today, it is even clearer that race has become less of a factor in voting. The high level of white votes for Obama strongly suggests that other black candidates facing overwhelmingly white constituencies can do well.

[Umm... I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far just yet. Obama is the male Oprah. Not just any black candidate can follow in his footsteps! -- J]

In 2002, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) spoke eloquently of racial change in his state. "There has been a transformation. It's a different state, it's a different political climate, it's a different political environment," he said. "It's a different world we live in. ... We have changed. We've come a great distance. ... It's not just in Georgia but in the American South. I think people are preparing to lay down the burden of race."

The enormous and heartening appeal of Obama among white voters certainly suggests that is the case. Whites refusing to vote for black candidates has finally gone the way of segregated water fountains. Or so we hope.

Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Stephan Thernstrom is a professor of history at Harvard University. They are the coauthors of "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible," published in 1997.