It has become obvious that Richard Cohen will not be satisfied until Barack Obama joins the Klan. Until then, the fact that some (and perhaps more than “someâ€) whites won’t vote for him due to his skin color will remain Obama’s own fault. Per Cohen’s column in the Washington Post, it is Obama’s responsibility to make “some†whites comfortable with his blackness by assuring them that he shares their distaste for darkies.
In today’s Post he wrote:
My guess is that he [Obama] still has not put the race issue to rest — maybe because he failed to do what Kennedy did in West Virginia. In that speech, Kennedy told Protestant West Virginians that when presidents took the oath of office, they were swearing to the separation of church and state. A president who breaks that oath is not only committing an impeachable offense, he said, “but he is committing a sin against God.” In other words, he told West Virginians that their major fear was baseless.
Obama in his Philadelphia speech said nothing as dramatic. On the contrary, when it came to the perceived threat posed by young black men (one out of every nine is in criminal custody), Obama built a fence around the issue by citing his grandmother’s “fear of black men who passed her by on the street” — suggesting it was comparable to what his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had said. He did not confront white fears. Instead, he implied that they were illegitimate.
Simply breathtaking.