Personally, I could go on all day about the many reasons I won’t be voting for Barack Obama without the fact that he’s of mixed race coming up once. Seldom (never?) in presidential politics has such an inexperienced candidate presenting so thin a resume with so few salient accomplishments as BHO been taken so seriously. If I were to hazard a guess, I might say that were BHO a white man (or a man of mixed race who appears white and identifies as white), he’d have been laughed out of the competition long ago (I specify “man” because, IMO, HRC’s list of “qualifications” is nearly as laughable).
Good piece, Ari, but I think you give the candidate a little too much credit for remaining above the color fray. After all, he has plenty of surrogates to play the racist card on his behalf. If–when–he loses, will he really accept it’s “due to his views, inexperience, and lack of authenticity, not because of his skin color”? I have my doubts. My guess is that in matters of race, he has more in common with the Rev. Wright and La Belle Michelle than we’d like to think.
