Obama, that is:

Joyner talks about Obama's crossover appeal to the GOP, and discusses the fact that a lot of conservatives have said they'll vote for Obama over Huckabee. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm waiting to be convinced. Of course, Joyner doesn't think either Huck or Obama will get their respective parties' nominations, though it would be interesting to watch from a "sociological" point of view if they did. (Obama, sure. Huck?—I'll be at my local Hemlock Bar.)

It’s also noteworthy that none of the Republican candidates last night did a particularly good job last night answering the question why, if Obama were to get the Democratic nomination, voters should pick them over him. Simply shouting “Liberal!” isn’t going to work after seven years during which elected Republicans demonstrated a combination of incompetence, disregard for civil liberties and the Constitution, and lost any claim to fiscal responsibility.

Well, yes. There's that. I'd call it the elephant in the room, but it's really a sort vacuum-like Black Hole where an elephant ought to have been.

And the Anchoress muses on how difficult it is to consider the potential candidacies of Mrs. Clinton and Obama without wrestling with the ghosts of biogotries past in this country:

Back in 2004, I felt like the press was blocking my view of John Kerry, asking me to hire someone without really letting me interview him or take his full measure. I’m wondering if the press will allow us to really see either one of these candidates fully, or if all this hype is just prep for an eventual Hillary/Obama ticket that no person would dream of voting against for fear of being called a sexist or a racist. If politics is reduced to nothing but labels and name-calling, then such a ticket would be perfect, right? It’s the “noble-person’s choice!”

I do hope we're past that. But I'm not positive that we're all the way there.

The candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are going to force—and hopefully help—the country to finally confront bigotries old and new. If the nation can start to really dialogue about racism and sexism honestly and openly, unconstrained by political correctness or by the knee-jerk fingerpointing and labeling that has managed to muddy up and obfuscate any real discussion on those issues for a few decades, that will be a very good thing, for all of us.

I wonder if we’re ready. I ask that knowing full well that I will probably be called every sort of variation of “racist” for daring to even suggest that racism or white guilt or bigotry plays any part in the current media circus. And, of course, for suggesting that Barack Obama’s thin resume demands that we learn more.

Okay, call me anything you like. But when youÂ’re done calling me names, how about we start really talking?

I'm ambivalent, of course. Sometimes I think we need to talk more about these things, and sometimes I think we need to just STFU.

Nonetheless, read the whole thing, which has a lot of thoughtful facets to it that I can't summarize here. As a bonus, it includes TA's commentary on the Dick Meyers remark that Barack Obama is a sort of "Rorschach test," which I thought was interesting at the time.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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