FROM the earliest days of his candidacy, US Senator Barack Obama has insisted that if he loses his bid to become the 44th President of the United States, it will not be because he is a black man. According to Obama, it will be because he will have failed to get across to a sufficient number of Americans the virtues of his message of 'change' and 'reform.'

I happen to think that Barack Obama is a little too intelligent to actually believe what he is saying. .

He must know that if he does lose it will most definitely be because he is black.

He will not lose because he lacks intelligence, experience, judgment, temperament or integrity. They have tried all of those, and come up wanting. He will lose because he is black.

And, despite what the current polls are saying, there is still an odds-on chance that Obama will lose. I learned for the first time the other day about what the pollsters call "the Bradley Effect"; I had never heard of it before. But now that I know what it is, I can say "only in America!"

The Bradley Effect refers to the California gubernatorial election in which, according to all the polls ¿including the "exit polls" taken after voting- former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley was a shoo-in for victory.

Except that he lost. And he lost because a large number of white voters lied about their intentions and about their actual vote; they preferred to do that than to admit that they had voted against Bradley because he was black.

In the current situation, the irony of it all is that Barack Obama isn't really all that, well, black.

This in no way is meant to negate my deep sense of pride in the man and in the nobility of his cause. I am very proud of Barack Obama and I deeply admire him. I also fear for him and his family. As a black man I certainly pray that Barack will be protected from harm at his every step, at his goings-in and his comings-out.

But he really is not all that black.

Although he is a son of a Kenyan father, very little of his acculturation (i.e. his upbringing) can be attributed to his African, or black, roots. He was brought up by his Caucasian mother and by his Caucasian grandparents.

After growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii, Obama took the benefit of the most Ivy-League of tertiary educations by attending Columbia University and then Harvard, where he became President of the most distinguished Harvard Law Review.

Nothing black whatsoever about any of that.

While Barack Obama appears to have the support of over 94 percentof American black voters, it is increasingly clear that the political organisation behind him, not to mention the bulk of his closest advisers, are white.

And therein lies the tale; Obama has garnered more support amongst white voters, particularly those in the 18 to 30 age bracket, than any other black politician in US history.

This may explain why Obama, for the sake of his candidacy, allowed himself to be convinced to throw his pastor the Rev Jeremiah Wright under the bus as the wolf pack came to devour them both, with Wright being wrongly labeled as little more than a unpatriotic anti-American "hatemonger."

Any black person who actually, as did I, grew up in the black church, will know that Rev. Wright (pictured with Obama at left) is, and was, no hatemonger, no such thing at all; that he is little more than a link in a long and valuable chain of articulate and assertive "liberation theologians" to whom we in the black community owe a great great debt.

Hopefully after the election, whatever its outcome, we shall see these two coming together again. That they are united by a love that some of us just will not understand is undoubted. .

As far as the forces of White Supremacy are concerned, Barack Obama is a very dangerous man indeed. He is also endangered.

Run, Barack, run!

Barack Obama has, just by existing and by having the nerve to persevere, catalysed and brought upon himself the most negative, heavily-coded, but thinly-veiled, campaign of raw and naked racism in the history of modern democracy.

In the next few weeks leading up to November 4, it will get worse and worse.

It really isn't a cake-walk being an assertive ambitious black man in this world. Speaking just for myself, I have often thought wistfully of coming back (in my next life if I get one) as a pretty young white girl, just for balance if nothing more.

Look at what they have put Barack Obama through already.

First there was the criticism, leveled initially by Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill (the first black President" indeed) and then shamelessly plagiarised by John McCain, by which Obama was accused of lacking sufficient "experience" and "competence" to assume the responsibility of the Presidency.

When Hillary Clinton declared of some areas that Obama simply wasn't "electable" there, what she and her husband meant ¿and they exploited it to the fullest- that some of their most ardent supporters would vote for Beelzebub before they would support a black man.

And, as for "competence", "experience", "integrity", Obama's opponents are leveling this criticism after eight years of George W Bush, no less!

Of course the underlying notion behind this criticism lost all currency after the revelation of McCain's surprise choice of running-mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. No sooner did she open her mouth did it become pellucidly clear that's McCain's slogans of "straight talk" and "Country First" were little more than cynical jokes.

If Senator McCain is actually elected (and I, for one, believe that "White Supremacy" will do all in its power 'by any means necessary' to ensure that he, rather than Obama, will be the next "leader of the free world" ¿another joke): Governor Palin really will be "a heartbeat away from the presidency".

And if that isn't the scariest thought, I don't know what is.

Palin's open appeal to "Joe Six-Pack" and to "Hockey Mom" is also a code.

Joe Six Pack is your everyday beer-swilling, fatbellied, racist cracker who thinks that any black man who graduates from high school and shows it is an "uppity" n-word.

And HOCKEY Moms! Not soccer, not basketball; but hockey; and who the hell plays and follows hockey the most? You got it, the rednecks.

And now they are trying to link Obama with a now-reformed "domestic terrorist"-turned-University Professor called Bill Ayers who did his worst when Barack was four years old.

What's next? Just wait for it: his friendship with Louis Farrakhan hasn't come out yet, but it will, a week or so before the election day.

Just listen to what has happened in the past few days at recent McCain and Palin rallies. Slogans of raw naked racism shouted from the crowd. It could get violent.

Until recently, I used to say that if the world could survive eight years of George W Bush and come out generally unscathed, we can survive anything.

I was wrong on a number of fronts.

There are at least two hidden minor premises in that misleading syllogistic conclusion because:: (i) the world has really not survived, not in the sense that we live in anything like the same world that saw at the beginning of the Bush Presidency No. 2; and (ii) the world has definitely not come out "generally unscathed".

We are well and truly¿ (well, you think of the word, and try to avoid a profanity).

Just name it: from the ongoing dogged and moronic refusal on the part of the Bush administration to acknowledge the role played by industrialised society in effecting potentially cataclysmic and destructive climate change, to an ultimately phony "war on terror" which has obliterated just about every remaining vestige of America's global moral authority on issues of human rights and torture, to the other war, i.e. the one in Iraq whose true purpose only history will determine because there never were Weapons of Mass Destruction, to "extraordinary rendition" by which innocent people have been literally snatched in foreign airports and whisked off to countries whose leaders just love to hang people by meathooks while they "question" them, to the near-annihilation of the global banking and credit system (not yet complete), to Guantanamo and the rape of human rights worldwide, and now the collapse of the global banking system, we are all, thanks to American policy in the past two terms of Bush II, in deep deep doo-doo.

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said it quite well the other day. "If you're drowning by the riverside," he said " and you see a man standing at the river bank holding a coil of rope and offering to throw it into the water for you, do you care whether he is white, black, green of fuschia?"

I get the feeling that White Supremacy still cares. This may account for why, at last, white supremacists are diminishing in number.