“It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense,” said Frank Rich in The New York Times. John McCain’s campaign has pandered to what it sees as the “real,” or presumably racist, America. But Obama’s surge in the polls—he’s now pulling even with McCain among white men—shows that Americans are not the “easily manipulated bigots” our “divisive politicians” think we are.

There is one group of Americans that remains obsessed with race, said David Boaz in the British daily Guardian: liberal journalists. Absent any evidence, they have cited comments by a few McCain supporters as proof that the Republican campaign has been race-baiting, but racism is “the dog that didn't bark” in this campaign.

Racism is still around, said Andrew Sullivan in The Times of London, but it won’t swing the election this year. Obama’s whole campaign was “deliberately crafted to cross racial and gender and geographic lines,” and it’s improbable success speaks, thankfully, to the decline of “racial and identity politics” in America.