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It is absolutely unrealistic for Obama - or anyone else for that matter - to think that race would not, or ever, be a factor in the presidential campaign this year.
Face it, we see Mr. Obama doesn't look like white folks and we see that Mrs. Clinton wears lipstick. We also see that lump in Mr. McCain's cheek no matter how many "good side" camera shots they take. And we see that John Edwards really has a nice head of hair and his wife is probably a few pounds overweight too. And Mitt Romney is so polished that we don't want to touch him because we might leave smudged fingerprints on his veneer.
What I don't get is Obama wanting to keep acting like "it" - the issue of race - doesn't exist in this campaign. Somebody remind Michele Obama that the voters in Illinois, downstate and elsewhere, already elected a black female U.S. Senator, Carol Mosely Braun, before they elected Obama. He wasn't breaking any new ground.
Michele Obama begs the issue when she replies, "We've been through this before." Maybe so, but the country has not EVER been through "this" before with both a female and half black man running neck and neck for President of the United States. So please humor us Ms. Harvard Law Thang as you brush "this" off like annoying little pieces of lint on your designer jacket.
That's the problem with these limousine elitists candidates. They try so hard to make us believe that they are "just like us," when the reality is, no they are not. That's the hypocrisy of the Obama campaign: The charade of trying to be at once both different and the same.
I's the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss: The fact that if Obama starts talking about race, his campaign is over. He knows it and we know it. But, if he really is about change, if he really does have a case for bringing the country together, and if he really thinks he is the right catalyst for that change, then WHY NOT BEGIN THE PROCESS RIGHT NOW AND START TALKING ABOUT IT? Doesn't honest leadership demand more than a simple "we've already been through this before?"
