President Obama

The fact that America can have a black president with a Muslim-sounding name makes us proud that this can happen in our country. One of the reasons Barack Obama is so successful is that he’s transcended the race issue. His upbringing left him unencumbered by many of the issues in this country that many American blacks feel handicapped by. When he first started his campaign, the Civil Rights establishment wasn’t with him and was thus backing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Many black politicians in the beginning saw that Sen. Obama was biologically an African-American, but culturally he had little or nothing in common with the black experience. This is why, initially, the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, along with many elected black figures, were not head-over-heels enamored with his candidacy. During that time he was challenged and taken to task on many issues that have just somehow disappeared over the last several months.

Have we as a country gone soft on Obama once more? Look, I’m all for achievement and history, but this guy is wrong, wrong, wrong on the issues. He’s inexperienced, and there will be crises and situations from which his media protectors can’t insulate him — Iran, to name one. I’m convinced that he could be the wrong man at the wrong time — and I take no racial pride in that. Many across the board feel that Sen. Obama is bringing full-circle the black experience in America, from slavery to the Civil Rights movement. In this process they feel that he represents the hope of America’s promise, that we are all created equal under the law and that we’ve finally healed our wounds from the stain of slavery.

A deeper and more meaningful question remains for us all. Do we really mean to compare the struggles of Southern-born and many American blacks with the experience of the son of a Kenyan bigamist who was raised outside the continental United States?

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