I think this is an intriguing metaphor, and worth exploring further. In the Cinderella folk story the heroine has attributes that are unrecognised and lie hidden, and after a period of brutality from those who are supposed to be caring for her, she unexpectedly achieves success and emerges from obscurity. Why might elements of this plot be so meaningful in relation to contemporary feelings about social workers?

I don’t think it was explicit, nor consciously in the mind of Lord Laming, but anyone who knows Cinderella will remember that this girl was the daughter of a man who remarried the ‘wicked stepmother’ who already had her own two daughters – the ‘ugly sisters’ of pantomime fun.

In modern parlance, she was abused daily and deemed to be no better than the cinders she was forced to sit in.

So this story has resonance in relation to the recent child abuse cases that we have become so familiar with in the media. I wonder if Laming had in mind more than just the idea that Cinderella is a good metaphor for how social workers are treated (under resourced and under-recognised). Did his choice of metaphor also imply that every day social workers must confront difficult and quite often very dangerous people, people who, like Cinderella’s stepmother, abuse and threaten children but who are experts in covering this up?

Cinderella rises above her ghastly situation, to marry the prince and live happily ever after. But there is no fairytale intervention for social workers, who must routinely deal with people whose minds, actions and ways of relating to others seem incomprehensible. Likewise and more importantly, there is no easy, failsafe way of preventing the most extreme forms of child abuse. To understand why, we have to understand something about the complex nature of the work that social workers routinely do.

when deeds are ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation

The notion of ‘evil’, which trips off the tabloid tongue so easily – and which was applied so readily to the child killers of Jamie Bulger – brings us to a halt in our understanding of what social workers have to face. This is because when deeds are conceptualised as ‘evil’ it relieves us from the burden of further explanation, even to our mostly secular contemporary minds. Evil is a coded way of stating the incomprehensibility of something. Even if governments seek to understand the causes of crime, to use Tony Blair’s famous phrase, large parts of popular opinion do not want to.

Among Lord Lamings’ findings was that ‘there had been an ‘over-emphasis on process and targets’, resulting in a ‘loss of confidence’ among social workers, who were overstretched and undertrained’ and that ‘progress was being “hampered” by an ‘over-complicated... tick-box assessment and recording system’. Many social workers concur, arguing that the emphasis on data-entry and record keeping has meant that less and less time is actually spent building relationships with family members that in itself is the key to detecting child abuse:

In his earlier report into the death of Victoria Climbié, Laming noted that parents were hostile and workers were frightened to visit their homes; and that ‘apparent or disguised cooperation from parents often prevented or delayed understanding of the severity of harm to the child, and cases drifted’. The latter was also a factor in the Baby P case, where the mother was adept at simulating compliance with social workers. Because of a lack of critical supervision that would have forced hard questioning of evidence, the social worker was allowed to assume that the mother was committed to improving her son’s care even though injuries occurred whilst he was with her.

Research shows that most people who abuse children over long periods are dedicated to disguising what is happening. It’s also clear that social workers along with doctors and police find it exceedingly difficult to confidently identify child abuse and torture. Their work is fundamentally interpretative, under conditions of extreme pressure and anxiety. In confronting a suspected child abuser a fierce, aggressive denial is normally the response. Are they rightly or wrongly accused? Whose version of reality is correct? Upon what basis do you make a judgement, which has serious consequences, especially when breaking up a family is now considered to be the last resort?

We are very familiar with popular narratives in film and television where we as the audience are held in suspense, not knowing for some time if the hero is actually a villain. As his actions slowly become more risky or mores suspicious to others we start to see, through their eyes, that s/he is not as first appeared. But we expect social workers to straightforwardly ‘know’ when child abuse is happening and being covered up and when it isn’t.

At the same time, social workers who act to remove a child from its parents because of suspected or known abuse are all too frequently accused of representing the overbearing power of the state, interfering in the private sphere of sacred family life. Social workers are vilified when children are removed from their parents because it is unthinkable that parents could intentionally harm their children and when this happens, social workers represent the flaunting of the unthinkable under our noses.

It seems therefore that social workers can’t ever win. Unlike others of their colleagues who care for children colleagues in the public sector such as doctors, nurses, police and teachers, who may at times achieve heroic status, social workers are the object of perpetual social anxiety and aggression. So perhaps there are obvious reasons why they will never be loved by the public. If we barely understand the nature of their work and would rather not understand it (we certainly seem unable to realise that they do succeed in keeping most children safe, day after day) that is because on behalf of us all they must not only directly encounter extremely distressing and terrorising human behaviour but also make life and death decisions in these circumstances.

If we who are not social workers find it hard to ‘think the unthinkable’, that mothers and fathers can intentionally harm their children, then we should remember that social workers in the field of child protection are confronted with having to think this every day. Inevitably, if they are under extreme pressure due to unfilled posts, lack of supervision and overloaded cases, their capacity to do this thinking is undermined. If they are not enabled to do the work of social work properly and with an emphasis on quality – with good, critical and experienced supervisors, time to develop relationships with children and families seen separately as well as together – social workers and the children they protect will never emerge from a Cinderella status.

Further reading

An interesting article by Eileen Munro of the London School of Economics argues that the reforms made in the wake of Laming’s report on Victoria Climbié’s death have weakened the quality of social work.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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If you think back to Margaret Thatcher, there was little sense in which anyone expected her to ‘represent feminism’, just because she was female, and rightly so in fact, although it was a bitter pill for many to swallow. She was first of all a Conservative. She was also tellingly represented as a female masquerading as a male, but that kind of sexism notwithstanding, one lesson many (including feminists) learned from the Thatcher episode was that anatomy is not destiny. Thatcher showed many woment that you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

Thatcher showed you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

So, to return to the US elections: one black candidate (Obama) and one female candidate (Clinton), followed by one female VP nomination on the Republican side, has blown the universalism of the old days out of the water. Obama’s burden of representation is: can he, as an educated black man, represent all peoples, not just non-whites, not just the middle classes? Clinton’s was: could she overcome the difficulty powerful women have in the public domain, of being likeable as well as being authoritative? Could she attract more than just the feminist vote?

In the midst of these struggles over the Democratic nomination, a textbook semiotic situation , John McCain was looking old, white and male, just because there were these other candidates who could be contrasted to him. McCain invoked himself as ‘the American president Americans have been waiting for’ (as opposed to Obama, he meant, whose Americanness was implicitly in question). But his problem as Republicans perceived it, was that against Obama and Clinton he appeared to be more like Bush, whereas he needed to put clear water between his own brand of Republican politics and the track record of the Bush administration.

Sarah Palin.
[image by Sskennel, some rights reserved]

Once Obama failed to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, the door was open to McCain to look like the progressive and agent of change by choosing a woman. So then the Republican party, picks Sarah Palin, a politically inexperienced self-styled ‘hockey mum’ from small town Alaska. She is often thus described, but this description is not my sexist inflection, it is exactly how she represents herself, and it is why the Republicans selected her. Palin was selected entirely for her gender and her entire pitch has been about folksy political illiteracy. Had she been a man, she would not have been picked for VP.

As I’ve pointed out, this American election is to a very great extent fought on the turf of identity politics, brought about by a mostly ‘happy’ collusion between political parties who seek to use identity politics and media institutions that for the most part are bent on the personalisation of politics.

Identity-exploiting candidates such as Palin use whatever connection to a community they have to appeal to voters' sense of cultural familiarity, which serves to obscure the candidates' competence or fitness for office.

Republican political machinery have been active in pushing Palin’s identity profile, with conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthusing that ‘A lot of women are calling in excited…The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president.’ Palin’s identity-based advantages go beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: ‘Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son.’ Of course she has traditional Republican political strengths: anti-abortion, anti-gun control, creationism, pro-oil drilling in Alaska, aggressive foreign policy inclinations and so on. But these are the default positions of  many a Republican candidate. But, only a woman could have been billed a ‘gun-toting, moose-hunting mother of five’ and have used a campaign image showing her sitting in the bloodstained snow, gun in hand, alongside the carcass of a large animal killed by her own fair hand. A mix of femininity and killer aggressiveness – an image of political woman based on the compromises necessary for women in Republican politics, combining a frontierswoman self-reliance with the sexual allure of a beauty contest winner.

Republican strategists...hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters

Republican strategists have been open in the hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believe that they had a right to a woman in the White House. It’s an extraordinary thought, that Palin was picked because it was considered that her anatomy could buy her Clinton’s votes, despite the fact she wears Republican clothes. Shades of  the Thatcher experience then, to any deluded voters thinking that she is a feminist ticket.

Indeed, feminist overtures and apple pie ‘mom’ was the balancing trick that Palin offered in her first rally in Ohio as VP nominee. She began by drawing on a hackneyed feminist metaphor, and directly echoing a speech of Clinton’s: ‘It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.’ In fashioning Palin’s affirmative action candidacy, the McCain campaign has gleefully adopted liberal feminist tactics and grievances that conservative Republicans have so long derided. No matter that Palin chastised Clinton for whining when she complained of sexism during the primary, or that McCain laughed approvingly when one of his supporters called Clinton a ‘bitch’.

However, lest she came over as an aggressive feminist (and given that conservatives traditionally scoff at the idea that American society systematically blocks women from advancement), the main theme of her speeches have been her own personal story, spliced with sentimental guff such as ‘Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys…I’m just one of many mums who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way’.

Palin’s popularity reflects, in great part, a cultural mistrust of expertise and intellectual rigour. Her inexperience as a former mayor of a tiny town and governor of a small, idiosyncratic state for less than two years, her confident ignorance about the economy and international relations, her ditzy delivery and religious zeal, all add up to the sense of a special kind of feminine ignorance catapulted onto the world stage.

At the televised debate last week between the VPs, Palin played all flickering eyelashes and flirty folksiness, at one point actually winking at the camera. As one typical political commentator said, ‘She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks’. In recent days, though, we have had less ‘lipstick’ and more ‘pitbull’, as an increasingly desperate McCain-Palin ticket exploits the anger of Republican extremists about Obama, stirring up mob-like behaviour in the ranks. As the Republicans move into the territory of assassinating Obama on racial grounds (Palin said he is someone ‘who doesn't see America as we do’), they move further into frivolity. Ignorance doesn’t have to be a woman, and ignorance may not secure votes in the long run, but only a woman could build her political credibility on the appeal of ignorance.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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But, what is less often discussed is the question of who is choosing choice. It does seem that we are simply to take for granted that this idea, one that is driving change and reform across the public sector, will lead us to better public services. For in the name of this idea, we are promised enhanced ‘transparency’, openness and democracy. On the face of it, it’s difficult to see why anyone could question that all these things are simply good things.

However, I wonder just what capacities we need in order to exercise choice in the first place. Exercising ‘choice’ is not just a case of being able to access ‘raw’ facts, after all. Facts always have a surrounding context in which we understand their importance and their meaning. Choice means that we take some care in selecting, that we use judgement or skill to distinguish what is to be preferred, which leads to being able to discriminate. Those advocating choice often seem to assume that exercising choice is a straightforward and uncomplicated matter. But if many of us nowadays find choosing a can of beans, or a electricity company a time-consuming and often ultimately inconclusive activity, how much more burdensome and challenging is it to have to constantly choose between doctors and hospitals for this or that treatment?

Just as has already happened with school ‘league tables’, and after a year-long review of the health service in England by the surgeon-minister, Lord Darzi, an announcement came in early July that hospitals would be required to publish "quality accounts" alongside the financial balance sheet. They will reveal information ranging from the death rates of surgeons to the relative satisfaction of patients during and after a course of treatment. NHS hospitals will be eligible for bonuses worth billions of pounds if they can demonstrate top quality clinical performance, the government said. Whereas a ‘poorer’ performer would lose patients to rival establishments with better clinical outcomes.

Patient's notes on board.

Understandably, potential patients want to know in advance about poor survival rate in particular hospitals. Who would not want to go somewhere safe, and with ‘better outcomes’ than elsewhere? Who would choose to ignore that information, if it was available. But that’s the rub, because the language of choice assumes there is a simple and direct relationship between this desire to reduce risk (to avoid unsafe doctors and hospitals and ultimately to avoid harm or death) and the solution, of successfully identifying doctors and hospitals that are less risky. It seems to me that the language of choice relies on an appeal to primitive desires in the population (‘I want to know if I’m less likely to die if I go to X hospital). But the solution it proposes is highly cognitively complex. Context and presentation are key elements and citizen-consumers would need to be educated in the social science of statistical interpretation before being able to fully take part; are these capacities equally available to everyone?

For, for example, mortality is not the only guide to the standard of treatment. A hospital that picked ‘bread and butter’ cases, turning away difficult operations, would score well. Another unit might have a higher mortality rate, by dint of having hugely expert surgeons prepared to take on complicated cases. How is a patient with a serious condition to ‘choose’, for emotionally s/he’d be drawn towards the ‘low mortality’ unit, perhaps against his/her interests. How does one judge which is ‘better’?

Another development in this armoury of consumer choice is that of a new website, iwantgreatcare.org, which will let patients rate and review every medic who has treated them. This follows hot on the heels of sites for customers of hotels, restaurants, books, travel companies to name a few, to record, praise or deride their experiences. Internet democracy is one way in which customer ‘choice’ is manifesting itself. The doctor behind the site claims that letting the public give medics individual reviews and rate their performance will help to bring about higher standards of care and to ‘choose’ which doctor to go and see.

Lord Darzi said: ‘For the first time, patients' own assessments of the success of their treatment and the quality of their experiences will have a direct impact on the way hospitals are funded.’ This may end up with a ‘social Darwinist’ survival of the fittest, which deals in primitive and absolute divisions between the bad and the good: the ‘bad’ (hospitals) go to the wall, and the ‘good’ are rewarded. Presumably then, the poorer performers, already punished with less income, will still have to treat patients, who will get worse treatment. Similar things have happened in education: parents are told they may ‘choose’ a school; in reality what are deemed ‘good’ schools are oversubscribed (and indeed become 'good' schools because wealthier parents are able to move into expensive catchment areas) and so not all parents may in fact be able to ‘choose’ those good schools. I have visions of ‘popular’ doctors on the iwantgreatcare.org website being in so much demand that there are long waiting lists at certain hospitals and no demand at others. How is this practicable, on the scale of a national health system?

The ‘choice’ agenda is part of a wider Labour government move away from a ‘one size fits all’ idea of public services towards a personalised system based around the ‘user’. But how many people really want a government to put so much energy into pursuing an ideology that, even if sounds ideal, has so many unintended consequences and assumes so much about the capacities of citizens?

Find out more

• Managing the NHS
• NHS management politics
• Our NHS, our future

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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By ‘latent’ I am emphasising a psychological approach to ideas. Namely, the idea of democracy like any idea, has some underlying meanings, which are perhaps not often very explicit or conscious.

On 28^th April, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust published a damning report into called Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern. It shows how the mechanics of UK elections have been tampered with to the extent that the UK now has the lowest public confidence in free and fair elections in Western Europe. Voters can now obtain a postal vote by simply requesting one, whereas they used to have to demonstrate they needed one because they would be away from home, or because of work commitments preventing attendance in person. Now, instances of poll rigging are not rare; the Rowntree report refers to 42 convictions for electoral fraud in the last 7 years. Rowntree is not alone in its criticism; the Council of Europe, the Electoral Commission and the Electoral Reform Society have all highlighted serious defects. The clearest way to clean up the system is individual registration. But crosses on postal votes for a whole household can easily be made fraudulently by the nominated householder.

So the danger of postal voting is that individual voters are denied their vote. The Rowntree report says that cheating is not exclusive to any one party or group, but that in the cases of some groups, extended family and kinship networks are mobilised to secure support for particular candidates, and patriarchs and ‘community leaders’ find it all too easy to collect the votes of weaker members of their group. Only 46 per cent of British Asians regard postal voting as safe, according to the report. When there was a parallel concern in sectarian Northern Ireland, postal votes were limited to those who could prove genuine inability to get to a polling booth; and each voter registers individually. But, the government says that postal voting is ‘more convenient’.

So, what is the meaning of voting and what part does the ballot box as a technology of democracy play? As Tony Benn has often said, election day is a great day because only then is every one of us equal in power. You can vote or spoil your paper in privacy. Your vote counts no more and no less than anybody else’s. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights stipulates ‘universal and equal suffrage, held by secret vote guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the elector’.

A vote concerns the expression of views on a collective state of affairs and so it follows that these must be collectively addressed. Elections are a modern version for the meeting place in which citizens gathered to decide the issues of the day. In a world of large populations, citizens can no longer gather together in one place, so they elect proxies – representatives – whose legal standing depends on virtual gatherings: periodic collections of votes by the non-present body of citizens. From painted balls in the clay jars of antiquity to the glass, wooden, and then metal boxes of more recent centuries, voting systems have always signified a self evident simplicity and directness. A real, physical piece of paper, the ballot, is dropped into the box. So long as you know your own vote will both be counted and count towards the final outcome of the election, the system is legitimate.

The psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott wrote perceptively some decades ago about democracy, saying that it can be defined as society well adjusted to its healthy individual members. That is, it assumes maturity for its members; but I’d turn this around to say that the very act of voting in a public space is what helps to create maturity. What are the accepted qualities of democratic machinery? he asked. In his view its essence is the free vote by secret ballot. This ensures the freedom of the people to express deep and private feelings, to vote someone in or to vote someone out. The secret ballot provides a space for individuals to take full responsibility for themselves.

One final thing occurred to me when I went to vote: the act of going to a place to vote brings one into an encounter, however brief and perfunctory, with one’s fellow citizens as citizens. The latent meaning of the ballot box is that it makes people gather, however temporarily. Thus it both symbolically and actually constitutes the very idea of a link between how individual people vote (a vote) and the aggregate (the vote). A vote is a gathering. But postal votes are surely part and parcel of the mantra of consumer choice in which the conception of public, shared space where all are equal is unimportant.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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However, I think there is enough evidence to show that women still contend with double standards in public. In presenting themselves as public persons, they must make finely tuned decisions about the nuances of gendered meanings. In public office they may struggle to find a rhetorical style – a persona – that the press and the public will accept as ‘authentic’. Hillary Clinton has continually been cursed with the perception that she is calculated, contrived and overly macho. We will never know if her famous tears may or may not have been equally calculated, which presents us with a modern conundrum. For we demand these days that politicians must act in such a way that is ‘true’ to themselves: so here we have tears that signify spontaneity and personal expressiveness, even if those same tears risk being regarded as contrived, fake, tactical. Clinton was at the time saying ‘It’s very personal for me, it’s not just political, it’s not just public’, which underlines her use of authenticity here.

 [Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.] 

is the double bind: if Clinton conducts herself in a male style, she risks disappointing those for whom having a woman candidate and president makes a difference. It seems to be the case that Clinton has lost the support of many professional women; and she may have suffered also for not having publicly shared her pain about the Lewinsky episode (by, for example, going on the Oprah Show!). Of course she may also not project the right kind of womanliness to attract Republican voters to the Democrat cause, having declared when Bill Clinton became president that she wouldn’t be the type of First Woman to bake. Would a man married to a female president even feel compelled to make a public statement about their role? If a woman is a strong leader she is at fault for not being a homemaker, but if she is a homemaker she is at fault for not having the qualities of the leader. The quality she needs to be a president – to hack it with the big boys – is the same quality that goes against her. If women talk loudly they are shrill; if they talk softly they are overly feminine and weak. And Clinton as a woman is described in ways that could not now be publicly used to describe Obama as a non-white; when a member of the audience at a John McCain event asked the Senator ‘How do we beat the bitch?’ McCain’s smiling reply was ‘Excellent question’.

Some commentators think that the Democratic race for nomination is inevitably reduced to that between a black man and a woman and that because the U.S population are more sexist than they are racist, Clinton will never win the candidacy and less even the Presidency. That is, to use semiotic terminology for a moment, a female signifier of difference from an unmarked (white, male) norm is more troubling than a black signifier of difference. This is not about whether people think Hillary Clinton is capable, knowledgeable, or rational; she is widely thought to be all these things, and these would be valued in a man. But these capacities are undermined by what is clearly a different wish that she show some kind of deeper, truer self, which is ‘feminine’. So far the consensus seems to be that while Obama looks unforced and his speeches are born of deep conviction, here we have a woman whose political ambitions and ambitiousness are seen to question her very humanity.

These problems appear whenever women enter the public sphere, and not just in the domain of politics. Kate McCann (whose daughter Madeleine was abducted in Portugal last summer) was probably right to complain that if she looked and acted in a more ‘maternal’ way, she would have had more sympathetic media coverage. Judged endlessly by her demeanour, which was considered too much the ice queen, there was deemed to be a necessary link between outward appearance and conduct and inner life. Her inner turmoil, then, should have been visible, her feelings closer to the surface – via dishevelled clothes, lack of care for the self, tearful inarticulacy. Because it wasn’t, and she exerted some control over her public self, she was regarded as quite possibly an irresponsible mother as well as a realistic suspect in her daughter’s abduction. I noticed that there was no similar questioning of the integrity of her husband, for Gerry McCann has been equally able to remain relatively emotionless and poker faced in public appearances.

There seems, then, to continue be a very strong wish to question the motives and even ethical capacity of women once they relenquish the maternal, the instinctive, the emotional – typically regarded as qualities belonging to private life but which they must leave behind once they step into a public, for which read masculine, role. Women often lose either way, damned if they do and damned if they don’t use an emotional register in public, either approache being judged to convey rich symbolic meanings that question their authenticity and ultimately their authority.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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What got me thinking about the possible meanings of ‘Obama’ was the entry of media tycoon and daytime Queen of the air Oprah Winfrey into Obama’s campaign at the end of last year. I wondered then how the personas of the ‘two Os’ could together alter the fortunes of the Obama campaign. I also wondered how her television fan base overlaps  with the political demographic that is so crucial for Obama. At their first rally together in South Carolina on December 8th, Obama drew attention to the unique nature of the event, given their ethnic origins: ‘Me being here is so unlikely…Just like Oprah being where she is so unlikely’. They were able to deploy the public personas they had already constructed through opening up their personal lives to the public – for Obama this was in two memoirs written before he was even a senator. They appealed directly to the state’s demographic (African Americans make up nearly half of all Democratic voters in this traditionally republican-voting state), peppering their speeches with ‘y’all’ and ‘you folks’. After making several references to church attendance, beauty parlours and God, Obama then danced to a Stevie Wonder song and invoked Martin Luther King: “But I’m not in this race because of the odds. I’m in it because of the ‘fierce urgency of now’’.

Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama.
[Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.]

7.6 million viewers watch Oprah's show a day. Will her endorsement of Obama be one of his greatest assets? Perhaps it will serve to further racialise Obama’s image, and then we have to assess if that will help or hinder him.  Whether Oprah's popularity will translate into votes for Obama in the state’s Jan. 26 primary is an open question, but it does seem the case that Winfrey’s popularity has got him out of the starting blocks pretty quickly, allowing him to tap a swathe of hitherto disinterested or disaffected black voters. Oprah's tour came as Obama had cut into Hillary Clinton’s support among female voters in some states and the opinion of US pollsters does seem to be that Winfrey could help Obama draw more middle-aged and older women, the core of Winfrey’s talk show viewership. For the key to any endorsement by celebrities is to win people over who are not already in your camp. Women account for more than half of the state’s black Democratic vote. So if her support makes a difference, it is likely to be amongst women, also considered a crucial part of Clinton’s base in early voting states. But black female voters are also prime target for the primaries in southern states, hence Winfrey’s mention of the large number of beauty parlours in South Carolina. She said, ‘We love to keep our hair done, don’t we?’ She added, ‘I know what it means to come from the South,’ a reference to her childhood in Mississippi. One middle-aged black woman interviewed after the rally said to a journalist that she admired Oprah and Obama because ‘they’re both self-made, positive African Americans’.

I think Obama is an ambiguous character; he both uses and doesn’t use his ethnic identity. He has, no doubt, very little choice in this. I think he has to capitalise on this ambiguity, as Ophrah has so successfully done. Of course it's inevitable that he’s accused of ‘acting like he’s white’ by radical blacks. Also inevitable is the danger of democrats voting for Hillary Clinton because they don’t believe a black man can win the presidency – a kind of disingenuous projection of racism onto others that makes you think of a favourite children’s joke: ‘whoever smelt it, dealt it!’ Just as important, though, is the problem of class. In the US it's common to speak in coded terms of ‘beer track’ and ‘wine track’ candidates. Obama’s biggest problem could be that he’s regarded as a brainy 'wine track' liberal and thus may lose out to a rival, Clinton, whose support is firmly rooted in the blue-collar, non-college degree communities. This seems to have been the case in the New Hampshire primary of Jan 8th.

Obama’s credibility and popularity with the electorate as a whole will I think rest on him being an African-American in a country founded on slavery who plays down the destructive aspect of racial divisiveness - he is indeed a 'positive', 'post-racial' African-American. Although he is young and relatively inexperienced compared to Clinton, you could argue he is indeed more 'urgent'. And that's because, as Andrew Sullivan has recently argued in the US magazine Atlantic Monthly, he may be able to bridge the fissures that threaten American culture, represented by the great divide between white secular-minded liberals and neo-conservative religious fundamentalists. Can he hold a mirror up to America in which it sees itself in multi-ethnic unity? However, to successfully attract the black vote in order to achieve the Democratic nomination is one thing; he also must successfully represent the economically marginalised and socially conservative voters across the US. Perhaps this is an even bigger challenge.

More on the 2008 US election

• Tears in her eyes
• Is there a double standard for women in public?
• Sarah Palin: when politics is personal, ignorance is a woman

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

Subscribe to Jessica Evans's posts