Book Festival: America's elections and the thorny issue of race

THE rise and rise of Barack Obama in the US primaries en route to the forthcoming presidential election is one of the bigger mountains on the political landscape this year. That two speakers from the audience in as many days have raised fears about Obama's safety is an indication of both the hope invested in him and the perceived precariousness of change.

The celebrated left-wing thinker Susan George admitted that she has been surprised by Obama's stratospheric rise and said she always holds out hope for a political sea-change in the land of her birth.

Balanced against this, however, is the fact that Obama will need to temper his progressive agenda for change in order to win the presidency. He is already "moving to the right", she says, and is "reconsidering on Iraq". He will need to do more if he is to win over one of the key voting groups, the Evangelical church.

This rise to power of this group within the US electorate is one of the subjects George discusses in her new book Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think. The movement, headed by the late Jerry Falwell, mobilised millions of American voters by holding "registering Sundays" in its mega-churches. But George says the term "neo-con" is something of a misnomer; the underlying ideology, which has been drip-fed carefully into the American psyche, is more like "neo-liberal", promoting rampant economic freedom and widening the gap between rich and poor. Which brings us to the subject of money…

The autumn election will cost in excess of $500 million, opening up questions about donors and political influence which makes our "cash for peerages" scandal look like a village fête. Put against George's other assertion that there is enough money in the world to feed every man, woman and child, it is sobering indeed.

The other issue which will inevitably dog the election is one of race. However careful Obama is being about positioning himself as a new kind of leader for a multicultural society, discussions tend to return again and again to him as a black American and a Muslim.

Such is our preoccupation with race, according to Kenan Malik, author of Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate. Though racism has become one of the modern world's great taboos, we continue to emphasise the differences between cultures rather than the similarities. Malik described how geneticist James Watson, jointly responsibly for the discovery of DNA, was vilified and sacked from his research post after making "racist" remarks about Africa. One incensed opponent argued that the subject "lies beyond the point of acceptable debate".

While he disagrees with Watson's comments, Malik also disagrees with the idea that such material should not be subject to discussion and scrutiny. As many others have in the past week at the Book Festival, he made a plea for rationality, and for opening up debate, critique and discussion rather than shutting it down.

He also asked us to look more carefully at multiculturalism, and our fervent desire to "tolerate" and "celebrate" diverse groups. This has the effect of distancing the various cultural groups in a society from one another, rather than acknowledging the increasing fluidity of race in the modern world.

And between these two, something completely different: a brand new short story by A L Kennedy. The lost soul who goes to watch a magician perform in Vanish provided moments of wry laughter as well as sharp insight. It fulfilled an ambition, Kennedy says, which has been with her for years: to write a story about escapology. That in turn comes from her grandfather, an amateur boxer and poker player with a fascination for Houdini, who seems to have been a significant influence on her life.

"He wanted to be a tail-gunner," Kennedy said, just like the protagonist of her Costa Award-winning novel, Day. "So I wrote a book for him."