Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian how his country celebrated Obama’s victory not only as one persoal to him but also as America’s victory over its ugly history of racism. Interestingly, he tells us that the US press in those days downplayed events that told the opposite story:

• The footnote, for instance, that the white supremacist website stormfront.org temporarily went dead on 5 November, the day after the election, because it was so inundated with requests for membership.
• And the tale about the Maine convenience store that started an “Osama Obama Shotgun Pool” inviting customers to bet on the date Obama would be shot, and saying: “Let’s hope we have a winner”.

These were treated as isolated events, but a year later, there has been an epidemic of hatred against the president:

• When we have a pastor, a real-live Baptist minister in Arizona, devoting a sermon to explaining why the president should “melt like a snail” (and he was explicit – he meant Obama should be killed).
• Obama, it was reported over the summer, receives 30 death threats a day, three or four times the number issued against Bush.
• And I think it can’t be just a coincidence that you will almost never see him give a speech out of doors, the middle of a heavily guarded military base (Fort Hood) providing a recent and rare exception.

Read more: Hate Obama? You may not be a racist. But you will be white