Is Obama some anti-American black separatist? That will certainly be the suspicion among most Americans, the uneducated white blue-collar voters as well as deep south whites. After flag-pin-gate, Muslim smears, Farrakahn smears, Michelle Obama's "proud" remarks, no hand on heart smear, his middle name... and just wait till they play that Wright sermon in a commercial right before the election. It will be Sista-Souljah times 10000000.

But if anyone actually took the time to read Obama's book they would think 'here is finally a president who deeply understands the problems and complexity concerning race and its relation to poverty. (Obama has even talked about rolling back affirmative action and supports class based affirmative action, and not race based affirmative action, something that MLK also supported) No leader should expect to lead our country into post-poverty or post-racial times if they don't have the proper understanding of the problems of race. I applaud Bush for denouncing the noose and denouncing using the word "lynching" lightly, and it was admirable him for turning attention to Africa and AIDS. But as Katrina came and left, there was a long window of opportunity to begin a social experiment to tackle and address the problem of race and poverty, yet the experiment of constructing a Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East would be the only priority for this administration, and the people of Katrina were left with FEMA and formaldehyde laced trailers.

Anyhow, before the media repeatedly starts AGAIN asking the stupid question, "wait a minute, well WHO is Barack Obama? and WHAT are his views" I would implore them to read his books and you'll see his views on race, and his views certainly do not reflect black grievance, like those of his pastor, but admiration in the fact that "people can change" as he said in the South Carolina CNN debate when asked, "Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black president?"

Read an excerpt from a NYT book review, including a beautiful passage from Obama's book:

The Audacity of Hope hews closely to formula. Each of its nine chapters—on broad, thematic subjects like politics, opportunity, faith, race, and family—begins with an anecdote that suggests the point he wants to make about the subject, then moves on to his ruminations about it, and ends with another anecdote meant to drive the point home. These can tend toward the homiletic (the chapter on faith ends with the sentence "I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of heaven"). Most unusually for an American politician, though, he has a sense of historical irony—and is willing to articulate it. After being sworn in to the Senate he listens to a stirring speech of welcome by Senator Robert Byrd, who warns of the "dangerous encroachment, year after year, of the Executive Branch on the Senate's precious independence." "Listening to Senator Byrd," he reflects:

" I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he'd been raised, but which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation.

I wondered if this would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining. I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life—like most of ours—has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate,whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America's founding : the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate's role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain."

courtesy of Dana Stevens:
Today’s NYT cover story on Obama’s late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, contains one passage that gave me a sinking feeling:

In Hawaii she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the poor.

Somewhere around the words “peasant blacksmithing,” I found myself thinking, “This man can never be president. His mother was just too cool.” American presidential mothers don’t drift bohemianly around the globe, marrying and divorcing foreigners, working for Third World development banks and discussing “esoteric Indonesian woodworking techniques” with their daughters. They are not named Stanley. They’re Barbaras and Dorothys; they wear pearls and host charity events. At the most, a presidential mother might, like Bill Clinton’s mother Virginia, be a working-class Southern widow abused by a rotten second husband. But that image still fit into a familiar American narrative of bootstrap pluck (and allowed Bill to keep telling that story about threatening his wife-beating stepfather with a golf club). Stanley Ann doesn’t sound like someone who needed that kind of help.

Obviously, people don’t cast their votes based on the biography of a candidate’s parent. But they do care about his or her familial story. (Indeed, as Hillary’s campaign has shown, sometimes that story can be hard to escape.) And the huge swath of the electorate that believes in a much more traditional notion of family (including not only evangelicals but Hispanic and white working-class Democrats) would no doubt balk at the very details in this piece that made me hoot “Right on!” One friend of Ms. Soetoro’s, discussing her two divorces, muses,  “She always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Another friend, an anthropologist, references a “Javanese belief” that if a couple is unhappy, “It’s just stupid to stay married.” Word up, sister—but I wonder if those beliefs won’t ring an alarm bell for family-values voters already wary of Obama’s complicated racial and cultural back story.

Elsewhere in the article (which is a font of killer quotes), Obama’s Kansas-born grandmother, Stanley Ann's mother, is cited as saying “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.” That skeptical xenophobia sounds like a much closer match to the worldview of most Americans than does Stanley Ann Soetoro’s brand of brainy bohemian globetrotting.

i dont know what world ferraro lives in, but obviously she has shown no curiosity about any other candidate other than hillary. she's not only close-minded about race, but about the candidacies of anyone else who ran.

Part of the reason Obama is so exciting to so many people (perhaps this only applies to the educated vote he keeps getting) is because he is such a cerebral guy... and for once this country could have a president who would sincerely be interested in tackling complex problems domestic and abroad.

 The reason Obama has been endorsed by nearly every professor or faculty member at Harvard Law School where he was a student and University of Chicago Law School where he taught (see huffpost's fundrace) (and also surprisingly none to hillary) is the reason why most of the educated probably support him, as conservative David Brooks points out

Brooks on Russert about Obama

I'm still hoping Hillary wins though, Obama is going to get mauled by the GOP while they make it look like McCain is taking the high road. The people in this country are for the most part, too stupid, too prejudiced, too suspicious to vote for Barack Hussein Obama. Obama will end up like John Kerry, just another loser in the Democratic party, and probably unable to run again for the presidency even when he does accumulate as much experience as John Kerry had when he ran in 04.

Primary Lessons:
What do the results so far tell us about Clinton and Obama as general election candidates?
by Jeff Greenfield

It's the political equivalent of "tastes great!" vs. "less filling!" among light-beer lovers: the Clinton-Obama battle over who will be a better general-election candidate based on the primary results. The Clinton campaign says she'd be the better fall candidate because she's stronger with her party's core of white working- and middle-class voters in Democratic states. The Obama campaign argues that he'd be better in the fall because he can attract independents, bring new younger voters to the polls, and compete in traditionally red states.

Who's right? Neither side. Why? Because they are both arguing from the false assumption that primary contests can provide a guide to the fall campaign. Look back across recent political history and you'll be hard-pressed to find such a link. Some of the counterexamples are blatantly obvious: In 1988, the Rev. Jesse Jackson won Democratic primaries in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia. Did that reveal Jackson's potential strength in the South as a general-election candidate? Of course not; it demonstrated that legions of white Southerners had fled the party in those states, leaving blacks a powerful voting bloc in the primary but insufficient in numbers to carry the general election. Or look at what happened in 1980 in the Michigan Republican primary. On May 20—well after Ronald Reagan had effectively clinched the GOP nomination—Michigan Republicans voted for George H.W. Bush in a landslide, 57.5 percent to 31.8 percent. Proof that Reagan would be weak in that state? That fall, he beat President Jimmy Carter there by six and a half points, a bigger margin than homeboy Gerald Ford had racked up against Carter four years earlier. Today, when journalists and campaigns set out to find "Reagan Democrats," they head straight for Macomb County, Mich.* There was no sign of enthusiasm for Reagan in the Republican primary of 1980 because Reagan Democrats weren't voting in the primary.

I offer this blindingly obvious point to suggest why it is mostly a fool's errand to find autumn portents in winter and spring primaries. To be even more blindingly obvious, the great majority of voters do not participate in the primaries.

 As of today, some 27 million people have votes in Democratic primaries and caucuses (counting Florida, where all the candidates were on the ballot, but not Michigan, where only Clinton and Chris Dodd were). In the 2004 general election, more than 122 million votes were cast. Any extrapolation about voting blocs based on primary results has to confront that elemental difference. Moreover, exit poll results from primaries don't always tell us what we think they tell us. Consider the much-sought-after independent voter. Independents are permitted to participate in primaries and caucuses in such competitive states as Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire. But exit polls simply ask respondents to identify themselves, so a registered Democrat or Republican who considers herself an independent thinker might tell an exit pollster she's "independent." In addition, even those voters who don't formally register with a party often have strong leanings one way or the other; the number of genuine "swing" voters is comparatively small. In the case of the current battle, we're divining, for example, whether Obama can draw white voters based on those who have decided to vote in Democratic primaries. We don't really know how this historic contest between a woman and an African-American is playing with white voters who are not part of the primary process. Maybe race and gender matter a lot less than they would have a few decades ago; maybe such voters are sitting this round out and will flock to the white guy in the fall. We are unlikely to get a persuasive answer to this question until the fall. Nor do we have any real clue about whether Clinton's showing among white working-class voters would mean much of anything should she be the Democrat to confront John McCain … or whether a campaign focused on the economy as opposed to national security would pull such voters to either Democrat. Can we guess? Sure. Can the primaries offer us actionable intelligence? Highly unlikely.

This is not to say that there are no clues at all to be gleaned from the primaries. Michael Barone—who is to political numbers what Bill James is to baseball statistics—offers this take on last week's Ohio primary: "In southeast Ohio, settled originally by Virginians and still Southern-accented today, Clinton carried all-white counties with 70 percent to 80 percent of the vote—more than she was carrying nearly all-white counties in central Texas. That raises doubts that Obama could run well in these counties, which provided critical votes in Bill Clinton's wins in Ohio in the 1990s and Jimmy Carter's narrow win there in 1976." Those findings have to give Obama backers pause.

If you're looking for better news for Obama, the measurable surge of younger voters in the primaries and caucuses suggests that the decadeslong wait for "the youth vote"—a wait that makes Godot look like the most punctual of men—may be over. After splitting their votes almost evenly between Gore and Bush in 2000, the 18- to 29-year-old cohort—some 20.5 million of them, by my exit poll arithmetic—produced a nine-point edge for John Kerry, or a boost of 2 million-plus votes. Greater numbers and a bigger margin for Obama in the fall could be decisive.

There's also one historical example that is heartbreakingly intriguing. When he won the 1968 Indiana primary, Robert Kennedy had the vote of a large number of conservative white working-class voters. (In 1970, two ex-Kennedy aides wrote a book debunking that claim; in his new book on the '68 race, The Last Campaign, historian Thurston Clarke debunks the debunkers.) There is anecdotal and statistical evidence suggesting that a chunk of the RFK primary voters wound up supporting George Wallace's third-party bid that November, when Democrat Hubert Humphrey ran against Nixon. We will never know whether Robert Kennedy could have kept those voters from defecting to Wallace—or whether the huge turnout of Hispanic and black voters for RFK in California that June would have occurred again in November and turned the tide in his favor in what was back then a Republican-tilting state.

Finally, there is one clear and consistent scenario in which primary contests provide telling clues about the fall: when an incumbent president faces a meaningful challenge for re-nomination within his own party. No president in modern times has ever survived such a challenge to win in the fall. Lyndon Johnson abdicated in 1968; Gerald Ford fended off Ronald Reagan in 1976 but lost that fall; Jimmy Carter beat Ted Kennedy but was swept away by Ronald Reagan four years later; and even George H.W. Bush, embarrassed in New Hampshire by Pat Buchanan, though never seriously threatened by him, had to invest so much time shoring up his base that the episode helped lead to his defeat in 1992. But the main lesson is that in searching the primary terrain for general-election hints, tread very carefully. As a rule, what happens in the primaries stays in the primaries.

by emily yoffe: Deborah Tannen, a linguist who writes about the differences between men and women, had a piece in the Washington Post about the double standard Hillary Clinton is subjected to. She cites the fact that when the New York Times endorsed her (how sexist of them!), they noted she was "brilliant if at times harsh-sounding." What is unfair about this? John McCain regularly gets accused of having an out-of-control temper. I've seen his (male) colleagues quoted as wondering if he has the temperament to be president. There is constant speculation as to whether Obama is tough enough. And John Edwards got tagged as a phony pretty boy. Is Tannen saying you can only say Clinton is "brilliant" but it's sexist to mention that she can also be a human threshing machine? Tannen goes on cite references to Clinton's years as first lady as another put-down of her—instead people should spend more time talking about her work as a senator. Well, Clinton explicitly and implicitly makes references to her years in the White House as a way of assuring that she has the experience to be president. That's why this knock on her supposed involvement with the Northern Ireland peace process was so cutting. And Tannen says talking about Clinton's failure to reform health care as first lady is unfair because as a senator she has been able to pass worthy, incremental changes in health-care policy. Again, what is unfair about pointing out that when Clinton had the executive power and the mandate for wholesale reform, she botched it? Surely Tannen does not mean to imply that simply criticizing a woman's personality or record is off limits.