It is one thing for McCain to try to resell his anti-bussing "school voucher"- snake oil to the group, but quite another for Obama to tell them that they are all deadbeats, and irresponsible, and they all stand and cheer as if he had just said that he would end racism with the first stroke of this Presidential pen. What actually happened is scary in the overly-staged restrained passivity but their equally curious collective emotional outburst.
No one has given a more viscerally normal (although less than dignified) reaction to Obama's incessant groveling than the Reverend Jessie Jackson, (when he suggested that maybe Obama should be neutered) although he immediately was forced to retract it. Have we all been so anesthetized and are so comatose in our deep racial denial that we can't see that Obama's groveling generally, and his doing so at the NAACP meeting represents passing a new Rubicon in American race relations? One that means having a black man as President of the U.S. can no more solve our deep structure racial problems than can Reverend Jackson's call for him to be neutered?
There is a subtext to this story and it is very transparent. It is that on the eve of having a Black elected President of the United States, American race relations are probably worse than they have ever been. We have a whole nation that is whistling past the same graveyard that we have collectively whistled pass, many times before. I take no comfort in saying this but, somehow, I hope Obama does not get elected, for if he does, there are going to be a lot of disappointed Americans of all tribes, and blacks will be number one amongst them.
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