FORMER President Jimmy Carter is right. There is undoubtedly a minority of Americans that does not believe a black man should be running their country. These people are die-hard racists and as Carter suggests, do seem to have played a disproportionate role in the town hall meetings that have so vituperatively denounced President Barack Obama’s proposed reforms of US health care.

Big business, anxious about the Obama administration’s carbon-cutting green instincts and Zionists fearful that Washington is finally truly interested in a just and equitable settlement for the Palestinian people, have clearly been involved as well. Their calculation is that if Obama’s first big policy initiative can be destroyed, then there is still a chance they might in their turn be able to sabotage his climate and Middle East plans as well. But neither lobby seems likely to have chosen to stoop to racism, if only because, were such a maneuver unmasked, the backlash would do their causes more harm than good.

Therefore it is a relatively well-organized bunch of racists who have been driving the movement to denounce the health reform proposals. When, as they do, they decry the plans as “un-American”, they do not simply mean that they are “socialist” — a political view of which the US political establishment has never considered itself guilty — but also that a real American is never a black man.

Nor is this the only tack that these egregious bigots have been pursuing. There is an attempt to prove that Obama was not born a US citizen, which were it true, would have disqualified him from becoming president. This noxious initiative claims variously that he was not, in fact, born in Hawaii, that because his father was a Kenyan, he was born a Kenyan and that regardless of where he was born, he could not take his mother’s US nationality. This sort of poisonous misinformation is the stuff of right-wing Internet blogs. These have served to stir up the concerns of the credulous who are concerned at the political direction the administration may be taking.

The question is whether Carter was right to play what mainstream Republicans have angrily denounced as “the race card”. To be accused of racism is a serious matter in the United States. Yet Carter has only expressed what many ordinary Americans were beginning to suspect as they listened to the vitriolic terms in which opponents of health-care reform have larded their views.

But there is another side to this coin. The outside world was energized last fall not simply because Americans elected themselves a lucid and eloquent president after the long incoherent years of Bush. The impact of Obama’s victory was all the greater precisely because he was black. The land of equal opportunity had finally lived up to one of the loftiest of its constitutional aims. Whatever their view of his politics, all Americans should be proud of what Obama represents for their own country and demonstrates about America to the rest of the world — the key message being that race no longer matters in the US.

Impasse in Kabul

THE UN should insist on a full investigation into the blatant election fraud, said The Times in an editorial on Wednesday. Excerpts:

Last month’s election in Afghanistan was stolen. At the very least, President Karzai must order a rerun in about 2,500 polling stations. The cheating, the ballot stuffing and the absurd instances of 100 percent turnout or a unanimous vote for Karzai have not only undermined the credibility of this costly exercise in democracy; they have provoked anger and suspicion between the Afghan government and its NATO allies and supporters and called into question the entire Western commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan.

At least 10 percent of the returns from polling stations, largely in the Pashtun south, are deeply suspect. As a result, the Electoral Complaints Commission, the body backed by the United Nations and headed by three foreign and two Afghan commissioners, has ordered the country’s Independent Election Commission to institute a recount and an investigation. Until then, it is impossible to declare a result. It is also likely Karzai, who claims 54 percent of the vote, will find that he has, in fact, won less than half the ballot and must face his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, in a runoff.

The impasse has caused a split among Western diplomats and UN officials. Peter Galbraith, the senior American diplomat in Afghanistan, has fallen out with his boss, Kai Eide, the Norwegian head of the UN mission, who has opposed the tough line that Galbraith wanted to take. Eide insists that the West cannot dictate to the Afghans and fears that demands for a full investigation into the fraud will be seen by Kabul as interference. He believes that a softly-softly approach, allowing Karzai’s victory to stand while seeking a face-saving recount in only about 1,000 polling places, would avoid a collapse of political authority at a critical time.

Eide is wrong. The robust approach favored by Galbraith as well as Richard Holbrooke, his friend and the special US envoy, is essential if the Karzai government is to have any credibility with its Western allies amid the increasingly skeptical questioning of the entire Afghan strategy. The election fraud is a political scandal, a blatant attempt to deceive the Afghan people and entrench in power a corrupt administration. It is now high time that the allies asserted the minimum conditions of a deployment that has cost huge sums and many lives.