KEY POINTS:
I don't want to just be the brown candidate, declared the Obama-like presidential candidate in an uncannily prescient 2004 episode of the hit TV series West Wing. "I want to be the American candidate."
Fair enough. You don't have to be particularly perspicacious to figure out that the
American candidate stands a better chance of winning the presidency than the brown candidate who bangs on about his Latino roots.
Like his West Wing alter-ego, Barack Obama's refusal to be defined by race during the real-life 2008 presidential campaign is as much a reflection of personal philosophy as tactical nous.
It remains to be seen whether his determination to transcend race is matched by American voters.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that a team of psychology professors who've been studying how Americans look at Obama through the prism of race have found that when research subjects were primed to think of Obama as a black candidate, they tended to regard him subconsciously as less American than John McCain or Hillary Clinton.
In fact, they unconsciously perceived him as less American even than former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"Race is a controversial, emotional subject in America, particularly in the context of this campaign," writes Kristof.
It's a controversial, emotional subject here, too. And complicated. Increasing diversity in the population requires a corresponding diversity in political representation.
But the lesson from Obama is that candidates who don't reach out across ethnic divides, who appear to talk only to their own, run the risk of turning off everyone else - as seems to have happened in the new East Auckland electorate of Botany, where fierce competition for Chinese votes between three Chinese candidates has alienated others in the electorate.
In a Herald street poll of 100 voters, 61 per cent said they didn't like Botany being seen as a "Chinese/ethnic battleground electorate".
The idea that people vote solely according to ethnicity has always seemed silly to me.
Who says, for example, that I have to automatically like a candidate because he or she is a Pacific Islander? What if I happen to think they're not that good, or that the policies they support will do more harm than good, not just for Pacific Islanders but generally?
And who exactly is the typical Pacific Island voter? Pacific Island voters aren't easy to pin down. An increasing number of us are multi-ethnic. We come from different islands, speak different languages, and 60 per cent of us were born here.
A friend tells me Pacific Islanders give their vote away too cheaply, but when you compare the Pacific policies of National (one page) and Labour's, there's no contest.
But getting PI voters to the voting booth is a mission. As Labour Party president Mike Williams told Scoop, around 40 per cent of Pacific Islanders who registered in 2005 didn't vote. Strangely, 30 per cent of them later told Labour's researchers that they remembered voting although they hadn't.
At Labour's Mangere electorate office they're noticing that many of those seeking help arrive in cars bearing Taito Phillip Field's party flags, suggesting that either people are confused about Field's relationship with Labour, or that their flag flying isn't necessarily an indication of their voting intentions.
Back in 2005, Field delivered Labour's largest majority, but things are a little more complicated this time round, thanks to Field's expulsion from Labour, amid fraud allegations and charges, which he has yet to face.
Mangere loyalties are now divided between Field and Labour.
The danger for Labour will be if conflicting loyalties keep even more voters at home than in 2005, when some 12,000 registered non-voters didn't bother to show.
But Helen Clark's recent frequent appearances in Mangere have done much to invigorate the Labour base. And the emergence of a strong Tongan Labour branch, and to a lesser extent the Niueans, Cook Islanders and Fijians, looks set to deliver Mangere for Labour, though not with the same stunning majority of 2005.
Field's appeal to moral panic on account of Labour's "ungodly" policies and its apparent departure from "family values" has won him some support from the community's most hard-line conservatives. There is widespread discontent about the section 59 repeal among those who want to be able to thrash their children, just as they do in the Islands. (And we wonder why violent offending is disproportionately high among Islanders.)
What do Pacific voters want? What everybody wants.
Morality matters, but I can't understand why beating children and same-sex marriage matter more than secure jobs, a living wage, good schools, quality pre-schools, free healthcare, decent and affordable accommodation, an adequate safety net when things fall apart, and safer neighbourhoods - where liquor outlets, pokies, loan sharks and "P"-peddlers aren't permitted to prey on vulnerable communities.
A recent study by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good in the United States has found that providing social and economic benefits to poor women does far more to reduce abortion than endless moralising.
Which suggests that economic policies that help the neediest rather than the asset-rich middle class may be a more effective path to a more moral and stable society.
Has the Labour-led Government been good for the Pacific Island communities? It all depends on whether you're the glass-half-full or the glass-half-empty voter.
Labour's delivered cheaper doctor's visits, income-related rents, fewer jobless and a rise in the minimum wage. But much more could and should be done for the poorest families of all ethnicities. The glass is never full.
