The annals of "post-racial" politics

Rule #1 for all future African-American presidential candidates: Don't scare whitey.

They are too many of them and they vote.

Here I've been thinking "Damn, I never thought I'd live to see a black man elected president. Someday, but not in my lifetime."

Then came Sen. Barack Obama.

I decided I liked him when I saw him on TV talking off-the-cuff to a crowd at a campaign rally, where he brought up the story that Vice President Dick Cheney was a distant cousin of his (which is true, apparently) and he said, in his cool, casual chuckle, that he was rather disappointed because, "Gee, why can't I be related to somebody cool?"

Hey now. This is a guy I could like.

Never mind some of his politics. I -- WE -- need someone different. Real different. After 8 years of this crap? Hell, yeah, why not.

And so Barack Obama kept it up, rolling up a lot of primary victories, unlikely as that seemed six months ago, and lo and behold, a lot of white people were voting for him.

Hey now. We're not as racist as I thought, I said to myself.

(This was a revelation, believe me.)

And it made me feel good.

Then came the senator's pastor on the YouTube and his wild sermonizing about America starting the AIDS epidemic to wipe out the black folk and how it's gawdamm America not God bless America and rich white men this and rich white men that.

The rev might as well have said, "Kill Whitey!"

And when the senator says, " Well, I never heard him say any of those shocking things at any of the services I attended over the past 20 years, he's a former Marine and a Biblical scholar," he sounds just like another politician.

So much for the post-racial era of hope in American politics.

Hillary Clinton looks like the cat that swallowed the canary.

When she said the other day that, No, she hadn't actually seen the videos of Sen. Obama's preacher fulminating from the pulpit, she is not believeable and sounds like just another politician, and we, of course are not surprised (since, after all, she hadn't seen the photo of Sen. Obama in his African Zulu warrior outfit before it hit the Drudge Report a few weeks ago, winky-winky.)

With the country still at war, the dollar plummeting in value, gasoline already $5-a-gallon in parts of California and the economy tanking, the Republicans, somehow, are managing to look a little less abhorrent than they should.