Remembering That Obama is Bi-Racial

According to fivethirtyeight.com, Obama has a 92.5% chance of winning the election. One person close to the election suggested that Obama could lose for two likely reasons: white people once in the privacy of the voting booth can't pull the lever, touch the screen, or punch the card for a black man, or African Americans don't turn out to vote. A combination of the two would surely defeat him.

McCain's use of nasty robocalls and Palin's speeches that continue the slimy insinuation that Obama has a more than passing acquaintance with Bill Ayers are coded messages: don't trust him, he's unknown because he is unfamiliar. Whereas McCain's negative ads are attacking Obama's character, Obama's ads that have been labeled "negative" are attacking McCain's policies, including the Obama ad that has McCain bragging that he voted with Bush 90% of the time. Sorry Andrea Mitchell from NBC, these aren't the same!

Now that Obama is taking time off the campaign trail to visit his ailing grandmother, perhaps Americans who are confused by the Republican slime will be reminded that Obama is bi-racial. His mother and grandparents raised him, and the complex creation of character that Obama traced in his first memoir "Dreams From My Father" comes from a bi-racial heritage. As Amin Maalouf writes in "On Identity" which I have been discussing here, we must leave behind single identities. They are the cause of genocide and violence. When I see the Obama crowds in West Palm Beach and St. Louis, most recently, I see a wave in my country that makes race less important, and a future together more important.

The Thorn That Nicked Him--McCain Quiets His Followers Inadequately

After weeks of going negative, according to one source, 100% of McCain's national ads are now negative, the tone of McCain-Palin rallies this week turned brutal. One reporter, yes, I heard him on MSNBC, on Keith Olbermann's Countdown, said that only "wingnuts" were showing up at McCain-Palin rallies now. He is attracting the angry and the ignorant.

But this is what is frightening me. When an older woman took the microphone yesterday and said that she was afraid of Obama because he was an "Arab," McCain didn't try to correct her misunderstanding at its core. Check out the CNN footage on YouTube. He retorted by saying that Obama is a "decent man," implying that Arabs aren't decent people. He never even thought to correct her racial profiling, her use of the word "Arab" as a synonym for "terrorist." Yet this is the kind of hatred that is coming out as a result of the negative campaign, the insistence that Obama's full name, including the dreaded "Hussein" be included, every time they speak, compounded by saying that Obama pals around with domestic terrorists.

In the past, when rumors went flying around the Internet, aimed at Jews, especially Jews living in Florida, that Obama was Muslim, no one in either campaign stopped to say: Hey, there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim. We can't use shorthand to condemn an entire religion because of its most extreme branches. That's what infuriates me, and as you can see, from my post on Religulous, Bill Maher's new film, I understand the problems with faith held with too much certitude.