Every now and again a simple story helps to remind you why this American election really means something different. Here’s an e-mail from last week that described an experience when voting early, as many Americans do. The e-mail read: “For me the most moving moment came when the family in front of me, comprising probably four generations of voters (including an 18-year-old girl voting for her first time and a ninetysomething hunched-over grandmother), got their turn to vote. When the old woman left the voting booth, she made it about halfway to the door before collapsing in a nearby chair, where she began weeping uncontrollably. When we rushed over to help, we realised that she wasn’t in trouble at all, but she had not truly believed, until she left the booth, she would ever live long enough to cast a vote for an African American for president.”

It’s telling that it took until after she cast the vote for the impact to truly be felt. History is like that. It creeps up on you after the fact. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this long, long election campaign is that the racial polarisation that everyone feared and everyone expected has happened only in a marginal kind of way.

Yes, there do appear to be some older white voters in Appalachia and other pockets of the country who simply will not vote for a black man. But unless we are all drastically shocked on November 5, the broader truth is that vast numbers of white Americans are prepared to vote for a black candidate; and in the early part of the primary season, vast numbers of black Americans were perfectly happy to cast their vote for a white woman. More interestingly, the polls suggest overwhelming Latino and Asian support for a black candidate, erasing fears that those racial dynamics would come into play.

What the Barack Obama phenomenon has revealed – and also accelerated, I think – is that the politically correct racial identity politics forged in the 1990s is on its way out. That does not mean racism doesn’t exist. It obviously still does – and there have been some ugly incidents and vile rhetoric among hardcore Republicans at several John McCain-Sarah Palin rallies – but even where it exists, it has not determined political judgment.

An Associated Press-Yahoo! poll in September found that one-third of white Democrats are prejudiced against African Americans in some respects, but 58% of even the racists still said they’d vote for Obama. Many of the nonracists could be found in the unlikeliest of places. My favourite single quote of the election was from Steve Nagy, a retired miner in West Virginia, talking to National Public Radio. “I’m 84 years old. I had a lot of good coloured people. They didn’t bother me. They was good to me, I was good to them. That’s all I can say.” He’s voting for Obama.

The entire Obama candidacy – and its extremely improbable rise – began with this gamble. No one knew if it would work. If you recall, a year ago Obama was an also-ran. At that point in the cycle jittery donors were asking why, in months, Obama had not been able to budge a 20 to 30-point Hillary Clinton lead in the primary polling. Moreover, postracism was against him: black voters preferred a white woman to a black man with a funny name. Obama’s bet was that Iowa would prove his doubters wrong. Why? Iowa is almost entirely white. If Obama won in lily-white Iowa, he would prove it was possible for a black man to become president of a majority white country founded in part on slavery.

Yes, you could argue that identity politics is still alive the other way round. African-American support for Obama is now even more monolithic than it normally is for the Democrat. Not by much, however – white Democrats have routinely got 90% support from the black community (remember Bill Clinton?). What is remarkable, though, is how Obama has avoided any direct racial appeals or crude identity politics. It’s in his interest, as well as in his soul, but he has also avoided other people forcing him into the black box.

The nearest this election came to being dangerously racialised was the Rev Jere-miah Wright blow-up in the spring. Obama was pushed into that box as hard as the media could manage. To be sure, the Clintons and Obama’s critics could claim legitimately that this was about his former pastor’s views, not his race.

However, the imagery and video were all about race and it took a speech of surpassing poise for Obama to defuse the peril. Defuse it he did, though – in a speech that will endure regardless of the result on November 4. And defuse it he did this past week in paying his possibly last respects to his white grandmother in Hawaii.

All we can securely say is that we have moved past the politically correct 1990s. From Jesse Jackson’s 1988 candidacy to Obama 20 years later is a long journey. In many ways the Obama campaign may be seen by history as the left’s final shaking off of the new-left racial politics that have plagued it since the 1970s. No wonder many conservatives are quietly impressed.

The irony, of course, is that racial and identity politics have not ended. They’ve just migrated to the right. The selection of Palin as the vice-presidential candidate was guided by identity politics. McCain clearly believed that a female candidate would appeal to former Hillary voters. The sexism in that assumption is pretty staggering – and American women swiftly and mercifully proved McCain wrong. In fact, what has been striking about the reaction to Palin is that women, even in the first blush of the marketing, have always been much less impressed by her than men.

Then, as Palin ducked any real policy speeches, she became an identity politics figure for the white right. She went to the heartland, which she kept calling the “pro-America” part of the country. By the end of the campaign her message was almost entirely: “Vote for me. I’m like you. You’re like me. We’re better than other people.”

It wasn’t racist. It was just the reductio ad absurdum of political appeals based purely on cultural or ethnic identity.

McCain had his own version, of course. He kept appealing to veterans, as if all veterans share the same politics and all veterans should always vote for another one.

In the end, elections are won on a combination of message and candidate. Obama’s message was a clear one of change and his appeal was deliberately crafted to cross racial and gender and geographic lines. McCain’s message was a muddled one and in the end had direct appeal only to people like him and his running mate. If Obama wins and McCain loses, the identity politics of right and left will be defeated and the 1990s will seem even further away. That’s one small reason why this conservative is cheering Obama on.

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