1.06.2008

The Problem With Obama: He's Black

The pundits have a million explanations to explain why Obama is winning (mostly centering around the notion that, in the wake of the Iraq debacle, he offers more "hope" and "change" than Hillary while being more electable than Kucinich, who offers real change, if not hope), but few can tell you the truth in our racially charged, embarrassed, and scared society. The truth is: he won because he's black. A white guy with two years experience would be a joke; this is patently, painfully, and obviously obvious to anyone with the slightest interest in reality.

But, the bumptious Obama is a very special kind of black man too. He is not like Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton. He does not rub white America's nose in its' racist past; rather he says, "if you'll accept me as a black man, with my reassuringly white facial features and speech patterns, I wont bring up your history of racism about which you feel so guilty and your heart bleeds so compassionately. It's a reasonable bargain too, but only if you're mostly concerned about healing racial wounds from other centuries that may or may not exist.

Of course, if you're mostly concerned with an economy that's heading toward recession, the loss of American business hegemony, more gov't and less freedom, skyrocketing health costs, greeting life with abortion rather than love, and, oh yes, Muslin fanatics who have vowed to kill 20 million of us, then the sweet talking, Harvard educated, black kid lawyer with two years experience seems like a very silly choice indeed.

One can't help having one's complacency and smugness disturbed by Max Rodenbeck's words: "Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad's death his desert followers had conquered all the centers of civilization. They has erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that as Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France. The triumph was not just military"

Against this backdrop you have our contumacious modern Democrats who hate America because they lack the intelligence to understand it, and who would have sold it to the Communists, had Republicans not stopped them. Now, surprise, the Democrats are weak on terrorism too, seeing it mostly as a manifestation of American cultural, economic , and military imperialism. We can only pray, hopelessly, that Obama wants to talk to modern Iran the way Muhammad wanted to talk to ancient Persia.

Republicans, those who are willing to be honest anyway, of course are hoping that Obama does win the Democratic nomination by just being black and, let's not forget, by selling the most laughably trite of political shibboleths,"hope" and "change" to the Demo