Political Comment

This morning on Meet the Press Colin Powell endorsed Barrack Obama for president, offering some fairly comprehensive reasons for doing so related both to Obama's strengths and questions Powell had about the shortcomings of the McCain-Palin ticket. However, when Howard Kurtz introduced the topic a little later on CNN, among his first points was the prospect that this was just a case of one black guy endorsing another black guy. If there was ever any doubt, this squarely puts Kurtz in the hack category, and signals his willingness to perpetuate a stupid and frankly offensive theme that opens the door for the kind of political hay the McCain campaign is currently trying to make of the ACORN situation.

Let's be honest-- there's no race card in American politics, there's a whole suit, and any game you want to play requires some acknowledgment of their equal value. Some years back a more astute commentator than I (it might've been the great American essayist Hal Crowther) noted that whenever someone said that s0-and-so won only because blacks voted for them, they were insinuating that African-American votes somehow weren't as legitimate as white votes. It's a notion that has its roots in the ugliest part of America's past, and can only be comforting to those who harbor some misguided sense of nostalgia for those earlier periods of segregation or even slavery. Those same benighted souls are always among the first to protest when an African-American invokes those days, telling them to get over it. Comments like Kurtz's (and I suspect we'll hear more of the same from his media colleagues over the next few days) and recent actions taken to suppress minority voting are a pretty clear indication that racial politics remain central to our system; but let's not mistake who put it in the forefront (it ain't Obama).