Thanks for the welcome!

When I wrote this, I wondered if I might get responses like yours, which, while wonderfully written, sort of used a nuclear bomb to kill an ant.

My only real point was that if a man’s half white, it’s not right (and maybe even opportunist) to call him black. That’s it.

I also know that I opened the potential worm can, so I should have expected it. Suffice it to say that Obama is a smart man, and has smart people advising him — that’s a good thing. Harping on anything race-oriented would have been a stupid move, and I’m sure he knew it. (Look where it got Al Sharpton.)

And truthfully, I’m not interested in crafting a persuasive political argument. Not only because, on many levels, I don’t believe they exist (meaning once an individual makes up his mind about a certain political stance or candidate, it’s pretty much impossible to change it**), but because that’s not what this forum is about. I leave the intelligent (and, unfortunately, mostly useless) political back-and-forth to sites devoted to more important things. 99% of the time, I’d rather talk about cute shoes, TV, Jake, and stuff that shakes no earth and challenges no regimes.

Again – welcome to you, Ross! Thanks for your thoughts today.

**unless you’re Joe Lieberman

PS – If I’m an idealist, it’s totally by accident.

Now come on, it has everything to do with how he looks. he doesn’t look black to you? go to wikipedia’s wikicommons page to see the portraits of all 44 presidents (the 44th portrait is unofficial, probably from the Senate) call me crazy, there’s something … I dunno, something different about how he looks, compared to the rest of them. Now I know that judging people ‘by the color of their skin and not the content of their character’ is how this nation got in this racial mess to begin with, but it’s a little late to say, “yeah, we were doing that, but it didn’t fly. So let’s drop it, all 300 million of us. right now.”

At any rate, here’s the great news: forms of hatred played their parts in these elections, and racism actually lost! Sadly, it lost out to an older and even more pervasive hatred in America: Misogyny. Palin was judged by her appearance- this was unfortunate. But here’s the step in the right direction: she was also judged by the content of her character- this was fortunate.

in a testament to his political savvy, Obama never once made his race an issue in the campaign, he didn’t harp on the historical significance. that’s smart politics. clinton and palin, however, had a slightly harder time containing their excitement over their own historical significance. bad politics.

Finally, you could craft a very persuasive argument that a country which values freedom is best served by someone who comes from a group of people who have historically been denied it, and who may therefore have a greater appreciation for it. this goes equally for blacks as it does for women and a variety of other groups.

by the way, I’m Ross, I’m new here.

lol.