Vince:
I decided your assumption I was a liar deserved a thoughtful response after all,(probably because I have a tendency to over think things, in particular criticism thrown at me).
It’s true Obama’s politics lean too far to the left for my taste, and perhaps by election day I would have decided that I could not vote for him on that basis. However you are wrong to say I am a liar about being behind him up until his grandma statement. Here’s why.
I was being racist. I was willing to back Obama simply because I had hope that electing a man of color as president would heal some of the racial wounds in this country. Wounds that I felt growing up in a mixed race family. I was willing to over look his leftist/marxist ideologies in favor of this concept of hope. I was aware that all the “yes we can” hype was just a bunch of crap, but I didn’t care. I wanted to see the Sharptons, Jacksons and Wrights of the world put in their place. A stupid reason to back a candidate, I agree, but I’ve never really been an ideologue. I’m a vacillating independent thinker, who at times can be quite indecisive in my attempt to see every side of an issue.
When he made that typical white person statement it was like a hypnotist snapping his fingers in your face and you wake up from a spell. I saw him in a new light, for the first time clearly, warts and all. Like I said, it’s possible, and even likely that something else would have caused me to turn away from him by election time. But your assumptions about me are based on a simplistic view of people; that they are all either conservative or liberal, left or right. My own voting record (I am a registered independent) is all over the place, and I have only voted for a Republican president once in the 20+ years I have been voting.
There are a lot of people who barely pay attention to politics. For example there are people in my own family who have never heard of Rev. Wright. These moderate independents are often the ones who decide elections. They are the ones Obama must court. They are the ones for whom character trumps ideology. And they are the ones he will lose if they become convinced he is a phony huckster at best , or a deceitful bigot at worst.
