Arkansan. 
…and he had eleven years to do it.
Skokie?
This Skokie?
Yes. Just naming nice places where nasty things have happened.
Yes, I remember that event, and guessed that why you may have included Skokie. But the only way your point makes sense is if the racist or anti-semetic event somehow reflected the views of the local voters.
However, the Nazis who marched in Skokie didn’t come from there. The reason they chose Skokie for their march is because because their targets lived there. In other words, Jewish people. At the time, and to a large extent even today, Skokie was known as a place with a large Jewish population.
So saying that a Jewish candidate would have a hard time getting elected in Skokie is nonsensical. To the extent you didn’t know about Skokie’s demographics, and whether Jewish people are electable there, my link to Skokie’s Village Board web page should have demonstrated that, if anything, it’s an electoral advantage.
Consider it poetic license, and I’ll offer my apologies again before I go to services at Yom Kippor.
Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis.
Do you even have the slightest idea as to what you are talking about? Jack Ryan was already far behind Obama when he dropped out of the race. No Illinois Republican was going to beat Obama in 2004, not with the ghost of George Ryan hanging over that campaign.
And Obama won a Dem primary against a field of white candidates.
Perhaps he’s misremembering what happened with Blair Hull, who was doing well until it came out that his ex-wife said he’d fought her and threatened to kill her.
The only good thing that came of that march:
I’m not really single issue, but that one is a deal breaker for me. Like Dseid’s prototypical voter, I like to vote for someone who has values like mine. His stance on flag burning would belie a vast difference beetween us on free speech. I did not vote for Gore because of his wife running the PMRC on senate time, ineffective as it was. Wasting my tax dollars is one thing, every politican does that, wasting them to limit my rights, needlessly, is another.
Abraham Lincoln was elected President after serving in the Illinois state legislature and a single, two-year term as Congressman. Eisenhower held no elective office before going to the White House. So we’ve certainly had some pretty good Presidents with little elective experience.
Is Obama too young or too new? I’m torn. The Senate hasn’t given us a President since JFK in 1960, and (people now forget) he too was tagged as inexperienced, callow, “a show horse and not a work horse,” etc. Obama is the flavor of the week right now, and seems bright, engaging and politically adept, but I have my doubts that a black man with a name like that will even be able to win the Democratic nomination, let alone prevail in November 2008. Maybe he’s more likely to be someone else’s running mate, two years hence?
From what I know of him, I’d vote for him. I just don’t know that there are enough other voters out there to make it happen.
It would be an interesting experiment to show how far we have come or not in race relations. I suspect it would be an ugly campaign . Racism would slowly come out.
Slowly? Karl Rove and his like-minded acolytes would have “unaffiliated” Swift Boat-style attack ads on the air inside of 36 hours…
Poor Barack’d better keep his nose clean. Every lover of bad puns awaits the headline:
OBAMA: SIN LADEN?
But yeah, our enemies think we’re an Abomination, really we might be an Obama Nation.
Come on, do we have to say this over and over again.
Obama wins the blue states. He could win the same ones that Kerry did, take every vote in those states; he gets the plurality of votes, and still loses since we have an electoral college to contend with.
You need a Democratic candidate that can swing over red states.
Obama can’t do this yet; Hillary never will.
McGovern and Mondale can also attest that it’s difficult to win without the north, east, or west.
As for it being “tougher” on Obama - yes, there’s a segment of the population that would never vote for a black man as President. How much of that segment do you think voted for Kerry, or Gore, or Clinton?
Now, flip it around - how much of the moderate Republican base would be willing to slip a little on the issues for a chance to vote for a black man as a point of proving that they’re not racists?
I may be wrong, but I’d note that Alan Steele, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Maryland - is running only a few points behind the Democratic candidate. And Maryland hasn’t elected a Republican Senator in thirty years. It hasn’t gone Republican in a Presidential election since Bush pere in '88. Steele being black sure doesn’t seem to be hurting him.
It would have to come out in order to get a large black voter turnout. Lots of blacks would think that he had no real chance because of his race so there would have to be ads and campaigns to light a fire and get people excited about a real possiblity of having a black president. This would be played along side ads warning people about recent voter supression tactics which could (and probably would) be tied to the civil rights movement. Uncle Tom accusations would be flying around too because he’s so articulate and clean cut. Some people would say Bill Clinton is more black than him.
Although it would cause a great divide, I think this needs to happen for this country to grow. We NEED to get someone who isn’t an ORWG as President to get the people re-involved in our government. We NEED to feel that we have a voice again. There is a very real and thick glass ceiling for people of color in the USA. How fantastic it would be to shatter it.
One great thing about our elections process is that we can cast secret ballots. So I could say all day long that I’m voting for Obama so that people wouldn’t think I’m racist and then, in the privacy of my booth, vote for the ORWG. Afterwards I could join my friends in clucking about those other racists who didn’t vote for the black guy.
I think if they call Obama on ‘too young’, all he has to do is play the Kennedy card. It’s the one card that would play better than Clinton.
And it’d be easy!