The Guardian jumps in this morning:

…A Newsweek poll published yesterday suggests that 19% of voters were not ready to elect an African-American president…

Which also seems to mean that 81 percent will vote for one. I was harsh yesterday, but only out of growing frustration (which some of you may share) with the demand that somehow white Americans are supposed to be totally smitten by Sen Obama . . . or they are backwards, racist idiots. No one tells me who to vote for (and certainly not in that manner): I will decide, for my own reasons, thank you very much.

So will other Americans, presumably. Now, as to the above poll: laugh at me if you will, but I don’t believe that Newsweek piece tells us what some in media obviously hope it does. Rather, I feel that oftentimes what many naysayers are revealing when they say “no” is that they aren’t ready, or willing (and should they be?) to elect a racial huckster.

And that’s because Americans do not elect an African-American president. They elect an American to be president. Media obviously doesn’t see the serious qualitative difference, but it’s a huge one.

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Also in Newsweek, Michael Hirsh explains — supported in part by his having enjoyed HBO’s “John Adams” and maybe an unmentioned viewing of “Gettysburg” — as to how the horrific “south-southwest” is strangling the country:

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee beat a fighting retreat until the South lost the Civil War. One hundred and forty-five years later, the South–or what has become the South-Southwest–has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores–in Pennsylvania and everywhere else…

…This region was heavily settled by Scots-Irish immigrants–the same ethnic mix King James I sent to Northern Ireland to clear out the native Celtic Catholics. After succeeding at that, they then settled the American Frontier, suffering Indian raids and fighting for their lives every step of the way. And the Southern frontiersmen never got over their hatred of the East Coast elites and a belief in the morality and nobility of defying them. Their champion was the Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson. The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers–and cultural weight…

…On foreign policy, the realism and internationalism of the Eastern elitist tradition once kept the Southern-frontier warrior culture and Wilsonian messianism in check. Now the latter two, in toxic combination, have taken over our national dialogue, and the Easterners are running for the hills…

…John McCain, even with the GOP nomination in hand, would never dare repeat his brave but politically foolhardy condemnation of the religious right in 2000 as “agents of intolerance.” Why? Because we have become an intolerant nation, and that’s what gets you elected.

Actually, it isn’t about “southernism”, or region: as the piece reveals it’s mostly — of course — about religion. Specifically, certain forms of Christianity, including, now, Roman Catholicism.

Take Sen McCain of then, as opposed to now. That perhaps he has realized that he was wrong in 2000, and that “evangelicals” — some of whose “intolerant” religious predecessors undergirded the abolitionist movement — might take a bit of umbrage at being termed “intolerant” and simply wouldn’t want to vote for him because they aren’t nearly as “intolerant” as Mr Hirsh thinks they are, doesn’t even enter the equation. And that “Eastern elitists” of even 100 years ago may have viewed Christianity rather differently than Mr Hirsh seems to believe they did, and that some were also (at least somewhat) anti-Semitic (unlike today’s coarse “evangelicals”, who are generally considered by media like Newsweek to be just a little too pro-Israel), is conveniently overlooked also.

Still, let’s not quibble. We have just been treated to a fascinating discourse on an America grown so nasty, anti-intellectual and “intolerant” that the raised Episcopalian (the same hysterical version of Christianity practiced by the always hysterical George Washington) and now quietly “evangelical” Southern Baptist (the same denomination as that well-known bigot Harry S. Truman) Sen McCain trounced his major “evangelical” opponent on the way to an early sewing up of the Republican presidential nomination, and a black Christian Sen Obama whose father was a Muslim from Kenya appears likely to be the Democratic nominee. Yes, power to the frontiersman: undoubtedly, uncouth mobs of mountain Jacksonians, farm animals hitched to their wagons, will be gate-crashing the next inauguration, waving in one hand the Bibles they can barely read, while firing their guns into the air with the other and shouting “Hallelujah!”.

How much lower can we go, one wonders? Still further we plunge down the “intolerant” slope the country has slid since Jefferson v. Adams in 1800. Because, as we know, that was truly America’s tolerant, intellectual “Age of Pericles”.