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I'm actually surprised that what people see when they look at Obama is a black man. Well, yes, of course he's black, but spend about a minute watching him and listening to him and you can't tell me that that's what you take away from the experience. He's charismatic as all hell, a great speaker, totally lacking in the typical political viciousness we've become accustomed to seeing. If people won't vote for him because he happens to have dark skin, well, I just can't understand people like that.
What I can understand is people who say that they think OTHER people will never vote for a black person, so that the only way to get a Dem elected is to nominate a white person. I don't agree with that -- I think it sells the American people short -- but I at least understand it. We have too much unsavory history to say that that is an irrational line of reasoning.
(My issue with Obama is totally different - I think he's a Rohrschach test; people see in him what they want to, whether or not there is something there. He's a pretty conventional politician in terms of his stances - typical big-city leftish Dem. But as I said, he's charismatic as all hell and has amazing presence, so people see him as the embodiment of dreams. That smells to me a bit too much like a cult of personality. But that's just me.)
That being said, I see the whole notion of identity politics to be poisonous and unedifying. It's not better when it's done in this country by Mike Huckabee than when it's done in Iraq by Muqtada al-Sadr.
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