Race not a factor when core melts

THE night before the US election last week, I rang my American cousins in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. I combined my annual Christmas call with a bit of research about their voting intentions. I had a pretty good idea who they were likely to vote for. They are all registered Democrats and they grew up in houses with photographs of the Kennedy brothers next to the obligatory one of John XXIII, John Paul II never quite having cut it in Italian kitchen religious art. I was right.

The two women, who are a few years younger than me, and their husbands voted for Barack Obama, but my godfather and his wife voted for John McCain.

In all the hoopla over the president-elect, especially about his racial origins, everyone seems to forget a lot of white people, especially poor whites, voted for Obama, but not because he was a symbol of anything.

They voted on solid issues.

My cousins are part of the great Italian diaspora on whose labour the rust belt of New York State was largely built. Around Niagara Falls, according to my cousin Angela, you could grow up without speaking or hearing anything other than Italian: just as in The Sopranos. Families are close; yes, we've got the same first names, having been named after the same people. Fiercely proud of their Italian heritage, they are highly sensitive about ethnicity, as are most Americans, and call themselves Italian Americans.

Niagara was the centre of electricity generation for the US northeast, and of a huge, now waning, chemical industry that in the 1970s caused terrible pollution through entire districts. There are areas of great natural beauty around these places, but by and large the urban areas are rather bleak. The climate is ferocious: it was not unusual for people in the construction industry to be without work all winter. With the factories and chemical industry dying, more people are going south. The whites who voted for Obama in these areas did so because the America their fathers and grandfathers migrated to, the working man's paradise, is no more.

They and their fathers built the industrial heartland but they are being left behind.

Denise and her husband, Joe, have five children. Joe dropped out of college to work at a chemical plant. He is entitled to two weeks off each year and suffers from all sorts of ailments induced by working at the plant. Denise suffers from a serious inherited chronic condition. She cannot afford the new generation of drugs that would stabilise her problem, so she has to take the older form, which keep her barely functioning.

The children are bright and two have scholarships to college, but at least one might have to follow his father into the plant, if there is a job for him. Denise's mum feeds everyone most nights.

The No1 issue for them, as it is for so many others, is health care. If Joe loses his job, the family will have to sell their house and move in with Denise's mum. Otherwise they are ineligible for government assistance. Only the really poor are given free health care in America.

The contrast with the situation in Australia is stark. Here we have a system where universality ensures quality: the same doctor treats public patients as well as private patients. Three of my children have a similar problem to Denise's, but here the illness is treated free in a public hospital and the drugs are subsidised under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

We have a cap on the amount a family has to pay and generous schemes such as the Child Disability Allowance further reduce the liability. To my American cousins this seems like nirvana. The promise of a universal health insurance system is why they voted for Obama; that and the promise of easier access to college education.

Denise's sister Angela and husband Tim also voted for Obama. They are well-educated, conservative Democrats. They have two young children, live in a good suburb and send their elder child to a Montessori school. But Tim works 12-hour days, takes no more than two weeks' holiday and, in this financial climate, if he loses his job, bang goes their health insurance.

They worry about being able to put their children through good colleges. When I asked Angela who she would vote for, she said Obama, even though they thought he might be a bit radical, because of "better health insurance and better college credit scheme".

I also asked the question that seemed to preoccupy so many. What about Obama's colour? "Oh that. No one seems to be talking that much about that, except Oprah Winfrey."

I knew there had been quite a bit of antipathy among the family to blacks, as they were called when I lived briefly in New York (and still are by most ordinary people). They were, and are, disproportionately represented in the welfare lines and criminal statistics. When my cousins were at school in Buffalo, they complained of intimidating gang violence between the black kids and various ethnic groups. Were they now really that colour blind? Or was Obama's mixed racial origin and cosmopolitan Hawaiian background the salve that no one was mentioning? Well yes, actually. Ironically, his exotic Kenyan origin seems to give him a foot in two camps, with people whose heritage is immigrant as well as black. Angela laughed. "He really is an African-American, but you know, he has been brought up white." True.

And what of the McCain voters? Maryanne was a Hillary Clinton Democrat. She was disappointed her gal didn't get the nomination. Unlike the other two parts of this family saga, she and her husband, my godfather, don't have children. They are well off and every year go to Italy, where they own a couple of houses. They have safe retirement plans, including health care. They are worried about the financial crisis and voted for McCain because they thought he had character and experience.

Interestingly, most of the cousins are practising Catholics and all are anti-abortion, so what about the life issues? Mother-of-five Denise is dismissive of both ideologies: "If you belong to the working poor, it is already cheaper to have an abortion than to have a baby, which wouldn't be the case if we had free health care, which the Republican pro-lifers don't want. But as for the pro-choice ideology, well, you don't get much choice if your only choice is an abortion." Good point.