For all the newsprint on Britain's local elections, the one that really matters, on a more global scale, is taking place across the pond, where Barack Obama's bandwagon has lost some of its momentum. While a New York Times/CBS News poll shows that 51% of Democratic primary voters expect him to win their party's nomination, that's much less impressive than 69% a month ago. Conversely, Hillary Clinton has gone up to 34% from 21%.
"He is in the middle of a shit-storm," a journalist tells the Guardian, referring to Obama's problems with his former Chicago pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, who claimed at the weekend that the US government developed the Aids virus to infect black people.
The International Herald Tribune notes that one unjust legacy of America's racist past is that prominent African-Americans are regularly called upon to explain what other black Americans say, whereas white public figures rarely face that burden.
John McCain, the Republican candidate, continues to embrace a pastor, John Hagee, whose bigotry matches that of Wright, the IHT points out.
The same point is made by EJ Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, who goes back to 1980, when Bailey Smith, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, declared: "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Ronald Reagan was at the conference when Smith made those remarks.
For Charles Derber and Yale Magrass, also in the IHT, Wright still utters nuggets of truth such as the "US is the No 1 killer in the world". Americans, they argue, need urgently to redraw the boundaries of respectable public debate.
There is some cheer for Obama, however. The Independent reports that the Illinois senator still seems to be winning the race that really counts: the one for superdelegates. Amid Democratic fears that the protracted battle between Obama and Clinton benefits the Republicans, Joe Andrew, a former leader of the Democratic party who has switched to Obama from Clinton, summed up the situation this way: "A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process."
This is an edited version of the Wrap, our digest of the daily papers.
