Prometheus 6

Barack Obama...try him again for the first time.

My reaction to the restructured reality represented by the linked article may seem peculiar to you, given that I have said I'm voting for him in the New York primary. But voting for John Edwards was a real possibility for me. I do not see Sen. Obama as an unalloyed good.

In his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama recalls sitting with a white, liberal Democrat in the Senate and listening to a black, inner-city legislator, whom he identified only as John Doe, speechifying on how the elimination of a particular program was blatant racism. The white colleague turned to Mr. Obama and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

Mr. Obama finds a lesson in that moment: White guilt has exhausted itself. Even fair-minded whites resist suggestions of racial victimization. Proposals that benefit minorities alone cannot be a basis for the broad coalitions needed to transform the country, he concluded. Only “universal appeals” for approaches that help all Americans, he wrote in his book, “schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it” can do that, “even if such strategies disproportionately help all Americans.”

I understand “even if such strategies disproportionately help all Americans” to mean, "whatever you deserve, take what you get." And it doesn't surprise me at all. I just don't hear any better from the other Democrats,

In a telephone interview, Mr. Obama denied that he had spoken less about race issues than other candidates. But he said he focused when possible on “the universal issues that all Americans care about.” His aim, he said, is “to build broader coalitions that can actually deliver health care for all people or jobs that pay a living wage or all the issues that face not only black Americans but Americans generally.”

and hear much worse from every Republican that lives. Truthfully, in voting for the Brother Senator I'm voting for the psychological impact a Black man will have on the collective psyche of a nation that denies its collectivity with the same ferocious intensity that it pursues it.

Sen. Obama has grown a lot politically in this run. He stopped saying stupid things about Black people and gained significant Black support without actually changing his message. I don't think he changed enough to need a rewrite of history a la Roland Fryer...Jack Ryan is  nowhere to be seen. Neither is Alan Keyes, though that's more understandable.