Last week, a network of loosely allied groups calling themselves the Tea Party Movement held their first national convention in the U.S. city of Nashville, Tennessee.

The keynote speaker was the former Republican Vice Presidential candidate in the 2008 general election, Sarah Palin who, unsurprisingly, received a tumultuous welcome in Nashville.

Palin is as much admired for her dazzling beauty as for her unpretentious, folksy common man plainness of speech and avid belief in America's greatness. Her speech this weekend overnight crowned her the de facto patroness of the Tea Party Movement.

On Monday Feb. 1 and Feb. 8, 2010, the BBC World Service radio broadcast a two-part documentary titled "Opposing Obama", on the growing number of White Americans in the heartland of the United States who are resisting the idea of an Obama presidency, partly because the economic crisis and unemployment are turning millions bitter, but mainly because Obama is Black.

Since Nov. 2009, Republicans have won every major election they have contested: two governorships in New Jersey and Virginia and a senate seat in Boston, the heart of the Democratic Party, a seat once occupied by the Kennedy family for 50 years.

The World Socialist Website explains that "The Massachusetts election, in particular, was an unmistakable expression of growing popular disillusionment with the former candidate of "change" and "hope." Under conditions of near-Depression levels of unemployment and rising poverty, Democratic voters, angered over the refusal of the administration to provide jobs, its efforts to cut health care services for millions of workers, and its ongoing bailout of Wall Street, either abstained in large numbers or registered a protest by voting for the little-known Republican candidate [Scott Brown]." (Monday Feb. 8, 2010)

The latest opinion polls indicate that in the race to find a senator for the Illinois seat vacated by President Obama, a Republican Mark Kirk leads Democrat Alexi Giannouliasis 46-42 percent and even this Obama seat is likely to be won by a Republican.

There is a tidal wave pouring over America and shaking the foundations of the political establishment.

Even at the height of George W. Bush's unpopularity of few weeks before the bitterly opposed second Iraq war in 2003, anger amongst U.S. citizens did not get to the point that resulted into well-organised movements across the country.

White America is angry that a Black occupies the White House; many are bitterly disillusioned that most of what Obama promised during his 2007 to 2008 campaign simply has not materialised.

In my then Saturday column in Kampala's Daily Monitor newspaper, I foresaw this extreme backlash against the election of the first Black president, by writing that "As Senator Obama embarked on his string of spectacular victories during the primary election campaign, I expressed my suspicion over what had suddenly entered the minds of Whites. Since when, I wondered, did they overcome their negative attitude toward Blacks, leading to this outpouring of affection for Obama?...If anything, Obama's presidency will see a rise of racism in America and Europe toward Blacks." (Daily Monitor, Nov. 2, 2008)

The BBC programme of today Monday Feb. 8, 2010 described the Tea Party Movement as "…a popular conservative insurgency that poses a challenge not just for Obama or the Democrats but for the entire political class."

Further than resentment toward Obama over being Black or --- to most in the Tea Party Movement --- a Muslim; further than anger at his broken promises or the incompetence of the Republicans in the Congress, there is something more: Americans sense that something is slipping out of their hands.

There is a deep-seated feeling, bordering on panic, that the United States of America is slowly but noticeably slipping from its position of pre-eminent world power into some kind of lame duck, lower First World, maybe even Second World-ish country at the level of Brazil or Russia, but no longer the great superpower familiar to the world.

The spate of crises and face-offs with China in recent months over the hacking into Google's servers, the fact that China topped the medals table at the 2008 Beijing summer Olympic Games, the humiliation of Obama by China at the Copenhagen climate change summit, China's threats to America should Obama meet the Dalai Lama this month in Washington, and the frustrating fact that China is gliding along smoothly with a 2009 economic growth rate of 8+ percent while America staggers along --- this feeling of panic and dismay that America is losing its position as the world's number one nation to a fast-rising China, is the subconscious theme behind the present political mood in the United States.

As bitterness deepens, White America, just as I foresaw in my Daily Monitor column in Nov. 2008, is fighting back, re-discovering or realizing that they have only a handful years of a chance, the last chance, before China takes over.

The millions who thought that the election of the first Black U.S. president would usher in a new era of harmonious race relations are now staring at a wounded country moving, scarily, in the direction of White supremacist thinking in mainstream society.

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