Both, Certainly

Which is to say both racial bigotry and political ideology are involved in the recent controversies over U.S. President Barack Obama's exercise of his executive office. There is such a long history of racial intolerance in the United States, despite a gradual relaxation of peoples' attitudes toward people of colour, that it can surely surprise no one that there is an undercurrent of racism involved in the criticism of this bi-racial and most certainly African-American president.

But the driver of the recent backlash against President Obama's striving to have Congress and the American people accept a new government-led policy toward health insurance is mostly led by politics. Not entirely, but for the most part. It is truly unfortunate that a scheme such as Canada has, with universal health coverage, is not possible for adaptation in the United States. The scheme that President Obama is left with, having had to assure his critics that he is not considering universal coverage akin to Canada's, will leave coverage a personal responsibility.

And that personal responsibility will likely result in hardship for many hard-working people whose work benefits do not include insurance coverage, and whose wages are so low that having to budget for still-whopping insurance fees will prove next to impossible for them. The health insurance brouhaha aside, there remains a large contingent of people in the United States for whom anything an African-American president does or promises to do, is viewed as an assault on heritage and tradition.

In the American South a mere ten percent of Americans cast their vote for Barack Obama. Not all who passed on the opportunity to make history by electing a Democratic Barack Obama are racist; merely Republican by choice and heritage. Which does not discount another sizeable bloc that do qualify as racist, and they have made their anger with the reality of a black president well known, claiming him to have been foreign-born and a secret Muslim, among other slurs in an attempt to claim the purported illegitimacy of his election as president.

There will always be political opposition of one kind or another, and opposition too based on discrimination of one kind or another; John F. Kennedy breached the gap between presidential material and Catholicism and made history that way; Barack Obama has taken it another, giant step further. Had a woman been elected president all the horking-mad misogynists would have given birth to other equally-incredible conspiracy theories in a lunatic rush to discredit a woman as being suitable presidential material.

This president of the United States has embarked on an agenda of his own. When he campaigned for the presidency he spoke of a new era, and promised massive change. Change of all kinds, internal and external. He is no super-man, he is simply a man with his own ideas of what is tolerable and what is not. Of how he can be useful to his country and his people in altering social and institutional covenants to improve the social contract.

But most people see comfort in the familiar, whether or not it benefits them. Change is often seen as disruptive and threatening, and this is what people react to; the unknown, the unfamiliar. As such they are ripe targets for campaigns that purport to explain matters in a light unfavourable to change. Americans have always been polarized politically, and much of that polarization saw its birth in the American Civil War. Old antagonisms die hard.

It was quite simply too naive to think that the election of Barack Obama would speedily breach the gap of the two isolated ideologies; one social the other political.