shelbinator.com

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s already been beaten to death. Many of my colleagues have always said I was getting behind a guy they considered a “loser” for the ‘08 race, and now they’re adding more abusive words to the mix after the loquacious and often rough-edged senator apparently attempted, according to many pundits, to set a record for the shortest campaign in history. Then again, few of my colleagues in politics around here can say they had a winning electoral season, so I’ll take their words with a grain of salt. What requires more than one grain of salt for me to palate is the way I think some dialogue on the left has revealed a double standard.

Right before the election, our favorite presidential smackdownee John Kerry regretfully and ineptly tried his hand at humor, and because he left out a simple pronoun, “you [the dumb president] get US stuck in Iraq” became “YOU [the dumb soldier] get stuck in Iraq.” It was damn near a catastrophe, but it wasn’t a war veteran making fun of troops.

I have no reason to believe that Joe Biden isn’t a similar victim of poor word order, or perhaps in this case, just bad punctuation. Other readers over at TPM Muckraker have already pointed out that the addition of a comma would make clear what I’m sure Sen. Biden intended — that the fact that Obama is a well-spoken, sharp-looking guy (though I wish those were the choices of words Biden had made) is in addition to and separate from the fact that he’s the first “mainstream African-American candidate.” My first (and continuing) impression of “clean” is that as a brand-new Senator, Obama lacks that Beltway stink of a career politician. He’s clean of almost any internally contradictory voting record that makes most people says Senators make terrible presidential candidates. I wish that was the post-game spin that Biden’s message advisors were telling him to go with, but hey, that’s why the guy needs to hire me. The fact that we can never call black people “articulate” without invoking a Chris Rock routine is just not a subject I’m going to discuss, but the people who are acting all indignant about the fact that Biden might expect anything less than articulate public speech from a Harvard grad are obviously forgetting the vast numbers of Ivy-educated politicians we’ve had who sound like complete boobs. (Need I point out the President went to Yale, hello?) It is precisely the way Obama articulates his message that sets a crowd on fire.

Well, almost. There is another factor, which apparently is something that is okay for black journalists to talk about but verboten for a white politician to point out. According to Debra Dickerson at Salon.com, we white people are doubly excited about Obama because we are

engaged in a paroxysm of self-congratulation; he’s the equivalent of Stephen Colbert’s “black friend.” Swooning over nice, safe Obama means you aren’t a racist. … He signals to whites that the racial turmoil and stalemate of the last generation are past and that with him comes a new day in politics when whites needn’t hold back for fear of being thought racist.

(Ha, as if Biden’s tribulations aren’t exactly evidence of the fact that we have not yet reached that “new day in politics.”) The obverse side of Obama’s racial identity is the fact he’s actually trailing Hillary Clinton among black voters (at least in Iowa), revealing an uncertainty about identity discussed by Dickerson, Stanley Crouch, and in summary in Friday’s Times by Rachel Swarns:

But while many whites embrace Mr. Obama’s melting pot background, it remains profoundly unsettling for some blacks who argue that he is distant from the struggles and cultural identities of most black Americans. The black columnist Stanley Crouch has said, “When black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,’ I do not know what they are talking about.”

Ms. Dickerson echoed that sentiment.

“I’ve got nothing but love for the brother, but we don’t have anything in common,” said Ms. Dickerson, who wrote recently about Mr. Obama in Salon, the online magazine. “His father was African. His mother was a white woman. He grew up with white grandparents.

“Now, I’m willing to adopt him,” Ms. Dickerson continued. “He married black. He acts black. But there’s a lot of distance between black Africans and African-Americans.”

So, is the same not-quite-blackness that cools black voters what stirs up white ones? I don’t doubt that for some people, it is. Is it because of white guilt, as Dickerson asserts? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s not quite guilt, but at least the simple, regrettable fact of human nature that people aren’t always crazy about people that are different from themselves, and if Obama isn’t “black like [them],” it isn’t all that surprising that the same traits make it easier for your average cracker to identify with him — and vote for him. (I can hear Miracle Max right now: “Your friend is only mostly black. There’s a difference between mostly black and all black.”) Maybe it’s just the fact that people are excited about the possibility we will finally reach another milestone in the evolution of our country that so many of us have known is a long time coming; does this moment have to be belittled by the fact that we’re not talking about “Ronald Washington from Detroit?”

Whichever angle you take, it’s the elephant in the room that everyone knows is there; but Joe Biden says there’s something “storybook” about the fact that Obama could seriously be our first black president — whatever that means to white or black or brown or swirl voters — and obviously this guy with the outstanding civil rights record and strong ties to the black community (as pointed out yet again by Donna Brazile on the tube this morning) is suddenly a racist??? Once again, the Democrats will manage to circle the wagons with the guns pointed inwards, and some will try to sacrifice Biden on the altar of perfect political correctness. A regrettable dumbass moment? Indeed. Indicative of a racist cancer in the progressive body politic? Simply not; stand down.

You know what’s really the most unfortunate consequence of all this? The fact that some news-watchers had to witness the following conversation between Chris Matthews and Rev. Al Sharpton:

MATTHEWS: I‘m not telling you anything, Reverend Sharpton. You‘re going to make your own decisions. You are a very funny, smart, brilliant guy.

SHARPTON: And I‘m clean, too.

MATTHEWS: Well, you said you take a bath every day. You know, the image of you in a big bathtub is just too much for me imagine in my limited imagination. I thought a shower, a light shower would be appropriate.

SHARPTON: No, no, I like to make sure I‘m very…

MATTHEWS: Do you have a ducky? Do you have a ducky? I want to know.

Oh the horror.

At least Dickerson manages to end us on what I hope is an acceptably positive note, though it should not be mistaken for a sign that this conversation in our culture is over….

Lumping us all together…erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress. Though actually, it is a kind of progress. And that’s why I break my silence: Obama, with his non-black ass, is doing us all a favor.

Since he had no part in our racial history, he is free of it. And once he’s opened the door to even an awkward embrace of candidates of color for the highest offices, the door will stay open. A side door, but an open door. … Still, this is progress. A non-black on the down low about his non-blackness is about to get what blacks have always asked for: to be judged on his merits. So let’s all just pretend that we’ve really overcome.

Baby steps.