Either it is the End of Days or Obama is starting to look as if he has come as advertised--the first post-racial candidate. David Duke doesn't mind him so much it seems. He doesn't like him, of course, but perhaps we are all growing up a little.
There can never be, and will never be, a clear line when ethnicity or skin pigmentation simply "doesn't matter." Not in centuries, anyway--if not milennia. But Obama has been so disciplined in his message and so constant in the public eye that it continues to matter less and less. And, I should think, that is a very, very good thing.
[F]ar from railing at Obama's rise, Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, "don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain." Sure, Duke considers Obama "a racist individual," citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. "They say he's for change. What change? He's become almost a cult figure. I don't see any shining light around Obama's head. I don't see any halos," Duke said.
There can never be, and will never be, a clear line when ethnicity or skin pigmentation simply "doesn't matter." Not in centuries, anyway--if not milennia. But Obama has been so disciplined in his message and so constant in the public eye that it continues to matter less and less. And, I should think, that is a very, very good thing.
