Sen. Obama Ashamed of White Heritage?

The Clintons and their allies in the mainstream media are wasting no time installing Hillary as the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nominee. It's all but a done deal right now, listening to the compliant media spin the story. As detailed in my last editorial the Clinton political machine is sweeping away all opposition within Democratic ranks to their unchallenged supremacy in party affairs.

The Clinton-friendly media are now busy setting the public up for an alleged Hillary vs. Obama contest for the right to be the party's presidential nominee in 2008. Actually, the race has already been all but formalized and whatever else transpires --- short of a political earthquake --- we'll see Hillary Clinton as the nominee with Barack Obama the vice-presidential nominee on the ticket. This is not rocket science; Obama is useful as a counterweight to the possibility that Condoleezza Rice might end up on the Republican ticket in 2008. His meager record in national office leads one to assume that Sen. Obama's merely window dressing/eye candy for a party base willing to vote personalities instead of policy considerations.

Most troublesome for many people is the media's all-consuming zeal to portray Sen. Obama as an "authentic" black politician, as if the color of his skin has to pass press scrutiny. Can you think of any other black Democrat who has to establish his "blackness"? The recent Obama trip to Africa, his father's native continent, is a case in point. The media reported on his itinerary the way a presidential state visit is covered, loaded with gushing portrayals of the senator's "Africanness" via his father and paternal family. The Chicago Tribune published a special edition devoted to the African tour which all but coronated the freshman senator as political royalty, and one recent national publication deemed Obama as the most important Illinois politician since Abraham Lincoln, if you can believe it.

Barack Obama's father divorced his white mother when the senator was two years old. Little or nothing in the way of the boy's contact with his father after that is available in published accounts, although I believe I read one account which said the young man briefly visited his father once in Kenya. The young Obama, after his mother's remarriage to an Indonesian student, went to live with his white maternal grandparents during his formative years. Little or nothing has been written about the senator's white family, who raised and nurtured him to adulthood. Little wonder then that Democratic powerbrokers and the media are anxious to solidify Obama's "blackness" via his ties to his Kenyan origins, since from what biographical information is available points to his primary de facto "whiteness".

And this leads to the very point of this exercise: Why are Democrats, the media, and Obama himself so intent on hiding his white family from view? For the next two years as the media and Democrats portray Sen. Obama as the black political icon of their party will nothing of his whiteness be revealed to the general public? Will no Sunday edition fluff magazine spreads be printed --- replete with multiple photos of the senator and his white family at various stages of his life? The fact that no such photojournalism/newspaper/media accounts have been produced to date leads me to suspect the worst; namely, that the media is refusing to acknowledge that the American meltingpot has brought forth a black national political figure more white than he is black, at least as far as his formative environment is concerned. From birth to young adulthood Sen. Barack Obama's background by all appearances is middle-class white; from young adulthood and beyond he seems to have carefully crafted a black biographical profile. Again, as if one had to be crafted.

How does this play into the Clintons' machinations? In a nutshell, the moment Sen. Obama is perceived to be a real threat to Hillary's presidential candidacy the media will at once begin to detail the very same biographical sketch I have, with the attendant media "questions" that will suddenly surround Obama's authentic blackness. As long as he compliantly follows the script that the Clinton machine and the media have written for him Barack Obama will surely be the party's vice-presidential nominee in 2008. The minute he begins to believe that same media hype about his being a viable presidential candidate will be the minute his political star will dim, starting with the dismantling of his carefully crafted, one-sided biographical/racial background.

Senator Obama is the product of a black African father and a white American mother from Kansas. He is entitled to be proud of his heritage, as every human being is entitled to be proud of his or her own heritage. When one aspect of history is downplayed or devalued, however, it leads to the suspicion that political manipulation is manifest. The public has been reading and hearing a lot about the senator's African heritage; is there any reason for him and his handlers to believe he has anything to be ashamed about in his white American heritage?