Letters to the Editor
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SO many false assumptions
Let me just take on a couple of them:
"Why is Edwards out, while Obama is still in?" Oh, it could only be because of Obama's race! Funny, but when Edwards was on his way down and out of this race, all I recall the Edwards supporters saying was that his anti-corporate message couldn't get much airtime because of the corporate-owned media (a plausible explanation, I might add). I don't remember Edwards or the Edwards folks ever once bellyaching that he was suffering from reverse racism (or, for that matter, reverse sexism).
"Obama is only doing as well as he is because of African-American support." Of course, here, people cite to the example of Mississippi, where he garnered 90% of the African-American vote. So, oh great, he got 90% of the white vote, but being deemed "the black candidate" appears to have cost him about 75% of the white vote. Don't you think he'd rather be getting voters who are more proportionally representative of the American public? Don't you think he sees the Mississippi results as rather distressing and more than a little sad? See, that's why he's tried his best to position himself as a trans-racial candidate, and why the *Clinton* campaign has tried their damndest to pigeonhole him as "the black candidate." If/when Obama becomes the Jesse Jackson of this campaign, he loses. You can't win an election with just the African-American vote, and conversely, you probably *can* win an election even if nearly every African-American in the country hates your guts (which I suppose is what Clinton is gambling on). As Eugene Robinson at the WPost says, "They don't call us a minority for nothing."