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My first response was based on Consis' first elaboration as set forth below...

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I'm Not A Racist

I think perhaps that Obama is absolutely a kind, generous, and capable leader. I think (however) he represents something much different. All the people I've spoken to about him can't seem to see past the fact that he's black. When ever I ask what he's done people respond with how he was the first black to do "this" or "that" in an exceptionally ranked university.

I honestly believe that if he became president then people would start demanding apologies for our American history of slavery. And once the apologies start coming, people will start demanding reparations in court.

In the simplest way I can possibly describe . . . Obama is not what people think he is. He is a great guy but all people can see is the fact that he's black and the larger implications of what that means to them personally. It's entirely ridiculous and I can't stand it. I won't stand for it.

When people talk of Colin Powell the tone is much different. He isn't some perfected political ivy-leaguer immigrant. He is a very intelligent man and I believe he is much more down to earth. Obama says too much of what is popular(much the way Clinton once did). He's too smooth for my taste while Powell is far more hardy and has a much more realistic view of the world.

Why do I compare Obama to Powell? I do it because I want to prove that I'm not a racist.

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I can't believe what I'm reading!!!

LOL --

Consis, you frequently have very insightful observations. Then once in a while you really crack me up with some of the things you say.

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I honestly believe that if he became president then people would start demanding apologies for our American history of slavery. And once the apologies start coming, people will start demanding reparations in court.

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(ROFL).... And if Clinton were elected bands of marauding underpaid women (me among them) would swell the streets demanding years of backpay for the fact that since WWII we have historically been paid sixty cents on the dollar for doing work identical to our male counterparts.

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In the simplest way I can possibly describe . . . Obama is not what people think he is.

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Consis, I think the most troubling thing about your entire post is that you seem to be basing your judgment of this person on other people's judgments. Isn't the critical question what you think he is? Maybe you should read his books and decide for yourself, rather than focusing on the perceptions of others. Or, if you are focusing on the perceptions of others for purposes of determining whether he is electable, then try watching C-Span's Washington Journal in the mornings and listen to the callers-in have to say, on both the Democratic and Republican lines. While you're at it, listen to what the callers-in have to say about Hillary Clinton, and decide for yourself which candidate you think is more electable.

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I think perhaps that Obama is absolutely a kind, generous, and capable leader. I think (however) he represents something much different. All the people I've spoken to about him can't seem to see past the fact that he's black...

He is a great guy but all people can see is the fact that he's black and the larger implications of what that means to them personally. It's entirely ridiculous and I can't stand it. I won't stand for it.

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It's pretty clear that Obama himself has long since seen past the fact of his heritage, which makes him perhaps one of the most qualified individuals to stand up for the Constitution. And funny thing is, when I talk to others about Obama their big fear is that he won't be electable because he's black despite the fact that, to a person, these people declare that this will not stop them from voting for him themselves. I try to remind people I speak with not to make this percieved unelectability a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the contrary, the polls so far tend to establish two things: first, that his mixed race is not a major factor in peoples' consideration, and second, that he is capturing a huge amount of attention from the moderate constituency -- both Democrat and Republican -- throughout the U.S.

The one point that people have the biggest reservation about is his lack of experience (hardly the "perfected political" you allege him to be). To which concern I would respond that, while partly sharing it myself, I must assert that experience has apparently not been terribly helpful of late in the White House, particularly when it is not accompanied by good judgment.

I submit to you that Obama makes up for in judgment what he lacks in experience. He's CLEARLY one of the smartest pair of feet to hit the Senate floor in decades, and not only would surround himself with a cabinet whose experience would make up for his lack of it, he would further ACTUALLY LISTEN to them. I think you can look to Swarzenagger's stint as governor to see that even inexperienced but politically talented individuals can do some pretty amazing bipartisan work when they choose good advisors and then follow the advice.

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When people talk of Colin Powell the tone is much different. He isn't some perfected political ivy-leaguer immigrant. He is a very intelligent man and I believe he is much more down to earth. Obama says too much of what is popular(much the way Clinton once did).

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(BTW -- Wasn't it you whom a few years ago I was try to persuade to consider a vote for Colin Powell, in response to your protests that he was a General and therefore unfit to be president because of his excessively military status?)

Colin Powell is the son of Jamaican immigrants, raised in the Bronx and attended George Washington University. He was an average student (probably bored) who went on to excel in the military and political arenas, becoming perhaps one of the most brilliant statesmen in this country for decades. He was the first Black Secretary of State, by the way, and during those early days much was spoken about it. I can guarandamntee you, if he were running for president, those "other people" you've been talking to would be all over themselves about the fact that he would be the first Black president of the United States. Would you let that stop you from voting for Powell were he to run?

Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan national and a woman from Kansas. He was also born in Hawaii (which is part of the United States last I checked, and clearly no immigrant which would have disqualified him from candidacy to begin with). He attended Occidental College the first couple of years then graduated from Columbia University and eventually Harvard Law School. He is also a gifted speaker, writer, public speaker, and apparently also a gifted politician, being a uniter not a divider.

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Whenever I ask what he's done people respond with how he was the first black to do "this" or "that" in an exceptionally ranked university.

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In fact, Obama became editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review. He happened to be the first Black one. Having been to law school I understand the significance of being the editor of any school's law review, let alone Harvard's, no matter what flavor one is.

I too ruffle at the overemphasis on the fact that he was "the first Black Harvard Law Review editor" or that Hillary Clinton would be "the first woman president" and/or any other such emphasis on these people's race or gender, rather than their qualifications. In fact I think it is appalling that we hold this country and its culture out to be the leader of the free world, and still engage in such antequated social thinking.

So, what does it mean to be an editor for the Harvard Law Review and does it have any value in its own merits?

Founded in part by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Jr., prominent alumni of the Harvard Law Review include Supreme Court Justices Edward Sanford, Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., as well as Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Charles Hamilton Houston, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Judge Richard Posner, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Chris Cox, New York governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, Yale Law Dean Harold Koh, former Canadian ambassador Allan Gotlieb, former New York State Solicitor General Preeta D. Bansal and once-and-future Harvard University president Derek Bok.

Notice any pattern here?

In terms of what Obama has done, instead of asking other people what he has done, read his autobiographies and find out for yourself. You might conclude that he's accomplished an extraordinary amount in a very short lifespan so far. The problem here is his age. He hasn't had time enough to do much more and has done a remarkable amount -- more than most people three times his age. But most of it was at the local level and therefore not terribly visible on the national scene. He has not deliberately done "visible" things because it's apparent that he does what he does for the sake of the task itself, not for the sake of visibility as is the case with other politicians of whom you know more. Don't fall into that old hackneyed trap, you know better than that.

The fact is, and it's pretty clear by the tone of his first autobiography, until the past few years he had no idea that he'd be launched into the national presidential eye out of nowhere. This is happening because he's just that good, not out of some decades-old design by him, as is almost always the case with those seeking the presidency. When those around him started seeing what they were seeing, the only natural reaction was to push him in that direction. Knowing his own weaknesses such as youth and inexperience, he's been resisting it for years, and has finally relented to the unrelenting pressure.

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He's too smooth for my taste while Powell is far more hardy and has a much more realistic view of the world.

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(QUOTES by Barack Obama)

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Pothead. Junkie. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bull**** and cheap moralism.

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(1995; taken from the autobiography "Dreams from My Father")


(Oh, man can I relate to that one)

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I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. (@2003)

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That's silly talk... Talk to my wife. She'll tell me I need to learn to just put my socks in the hamper. (@2005)

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Of course I inhaled. That was the point. (2006)

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(That one too)

On what information do you base your assumptions about how Obama perceives "the world?" Have you ever watched him on the Senate floor debating legislation or interviewing Bush's nominees on Senate confirmation panels (or read his books)? You might have a different, perhaps more informed view of Obama's "view of the world" if you did.

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Why do I compare Obama to Powell? I do it because I want to prove that I'm not a racist.

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Consis, I urge you not to focus on race in your thinking just because others are, whether it be positively or negatively. Here are the real questions: Would he be a good president?

Would he be able to heal the polarized Congress and get anything done? Just watch him bounding down the Senate isle a few times to spur an impromptu caucus of Senators ranging from Hillary Clinton to Tom Tancredo. Just watch as they crowd around him on the Senate floor with their heads together, talking amongst one another, with Barack clearly leading the discussion and laughter -- yes -- laughter erupting among this otherwise unlikely group during a serious discussion about some contentious piece of legislation -- and you will know you're looking a kind of political greatness that hearkens both Colin Powell and Bobby Kennedy all in a single body.

Perhaps our greatest problem right now is a growing instability in the Middle East with no one in the administration apparently either able or willing to engage in any remedial diplomacy. The "Shiia Crescent" is emerging right under our noses and we're not doing a damn thing about it. Anyone who knows anything about international history knows that this situation is perilous, probably beyond any situation in history.

Can you imagine what would happen to the negative global sentiment toward the US if Obama were elected? I confidently predict it would make a near instantaneous turnaround. Will he make a good stateman and ambassador to the rest of the world? I wonder if you would have any serious doubts about this were you to watch him and listen to him yourself for a few months.

But most important of all -- Is he electable? Will the Dems once again be shooting themselves in the foot if they forward him as their candidate in the general election? Early returns say probably not -- he's perceived as a uniter, is well-liked among moderate Republicans as well as Democrats, and is reviled by virtually no one. Alternatively, for better or worse, whether fair or unfair, the fact is that none of these things can be said about Clinton.

None of the rest of it matters if our candidate is not electable. It is what it is and no amount of wishful thinking or rationalization will change it. If we haven't learned that lesson yet then we have learned absolutely nothing in the past six years.

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(One MoreThing)

Speaking of favorite quotes, my personal favorite is a quote by Colin Powell. During a beltway soire' shortly after the invasion of Iraq, in response to a statement that Bush was "sleeping like a baby," he responded:

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So am I. Every two hours I wake up screaming.

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...let me try and crystalize some of my thoughts about Barack Obama.

First of all, Consis, I can't get this "he's Black... he's Black... he's Black" mantra you are spouting out of my head.

Have you forgotten he's also White?

Why is it that just because one has the blood of something less pure than "White" it automatically and completely makes them that "less-than-pure blood"?

As somewhat of a neapolitan ice-cream sort myself, I have a particular understanding and awareness of this strange phenomenon. I have battled all my life with the fact that I have White blood and Indian blood.

Being a breed invisibly marginalizes you. The people in either camp can never understand why you aren't all either one thing or the other thing; both relentlessly scrutinize you for signs of "loyalty" or "disloyalty;" unconsciously perhaps but nevertheless looking for evidence that you are a hidden traitor with alien, frightening, perhaps threatening thoughts, beliefs and ideals. Neither is able to understand that you are neither, and both, and something altogether different at the same time -- that your feet are "in two canoes and you are headed for a split waterfall" as I used to try and describe it.

And neither can completely accept you as one of "them" because your thinking and perceptions incorporate elements that are alien to them.

First I tried to be all one thing, then I tried to be all the other. Neither completely took. Eventually I froze in my canoe-fitted tracks, and that waterfall still lies before me.

I don't think that anyone who hasn't had to grapple with racial identity knows how that invisible marginalization works on you -- how, no matter what you do, you will never be comfortable inside your own "skin," because the color of your skin at once creates inaccurate assumptions and belies an untruth about yourself that you yourself somehow cannot resolve. The expectations placed on you don't fit no matter which side they come from.

And before you get off on any allegations about a "lack of individualism" you might espouse toward me or any other breed you might know, let me remind you that individualism is at the outset defined by the rules of the society you live in. A Kalahari bushman's individualism is tied to how great a leader he is in his community, how profound his spiritual insights for his village are, or how many kills he has had in one season. An American businessman's individualism is tied to how innovative his management and investment techniques are in a given season.

You have no idea how profound your sense of individualism is tied to your social legitimacy until that social legitimacy is taken away from you, or it's never defined by a single set of terms to begin with. When you are tied to two different societies, you have no single set of social terms within which to work. That's the whole problem. If you have not been there, if you have never had a foot in two canoes headed downstream toward a split waterfall, you can neither conceive of it nor speak of it.

Your White husband thinks of global warming (if he believes it at all) as a scientific or perhaps ecological issue. He doesn't understand why you find global warming to be at the outset an ethical, even spiritual dilemma, because he is not spiritually tied to the land in the same way you are.

Your Indian friends don't understand why you try to excel in the same Westen legal system whose Supreme Court produced the Cherokee Trilogy that virtually castrated Indian sovereignty.

And you may as well give up trying to explain your actions to either side; they will think you a traitor or wierdo no matter how eloquent and reasonable you are, because the postulates of your thinking on either issue just aren't there for them.

That's what is amazing about Obama. He's completely comfortable within his own skin. His own racial heritage, while sensitizing him to issues on two sides of a great chasm that others cannot seem to bridge, is no longer a personal drawback for him.

Instead, he ended up incorporating his mixed racial reality into his personality, his thinking, his actions, and his abilities to manifest change in the thinking in those around him, no matter who they are or where they came from. He's turned what for some of us remains a liability into an extraordinary source of strength and ability to unite people who otherwise could not be united. No matter who they are, no matter where they are from, no matter what flavor they are, no matter what political party they belong to. He seems to have a manner about him that makes people around him capable of hearing and understanding things when they come out of his mouth. He's taken the universality of humanity to a level that most of us could only dream of.

And that, my friends, as I can tell you from my personal experience, is a remarkable feat, indeed.

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