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For historical reasons, skin colour is still important in the United States but John Kerry, in promoting Barack Obama as a mediator between East and West, put forward a very facile point of view. Andrew Sullivan, who has a column in "The Sunday Times" (London) has been flogging the same idea for a considerable time i.e. that the hue of Obama's skin would endear him to the Muslim world. It doesn't seem to have benefited Condoleezza Rice in her dealings with intransigent people in the Middle East and, in my own country, people indigenous to these islands and with exactly the same looks (some better than others!) have sustained a fanatical hatred for each other which originated in religion and the "territorial imperative".
If Senator Kerry was able to point to something more compelling than skin colour in his advocacy for Senator Obama's ability to enhance American foreign policy, it might have been worth listening to but he didn't. The word "Muslim" is too tenuous anyway. The last time I looked at tv pictures of the Mahdi army in Basra fighting their fellow-Iraqis, I didn't think skin colour came into the equation. It is the age-old story whose plot involves the nexus of religion and territory, the latter exacerbated by oil-wells. Barack Obama is an American, first and foremost. His ancestry is interesting but not unique. Background is even more important. An example of this can be found in Europe where dark-skinned people of West Indian (Caribbean) ancestry do'nt often "get along" with African immigrants. The world is indeed "incorrigibly plural" and that is not necessarily a bad thing, unless difference is used to foment hatred and war.
As for John Kerry, I'd have liked someone with a bit of fire-in-his-belly in 2004 instead of someone like Kerry who turned tail and ran away, giving America and the world another four years of stupidity in the elected leader of the free world. John Kerry has endorsed Barack Obama? What a bonus!
