Can Obama end the racial barter?

Exactly. The Boomers want to create change the way they did it the '50 and 60's. They want to use the same 1968 map to get around Dallas, but it is now nearly 2008 and that map is out dated and outmoded. It worked great in '68, but your not gonna find Victory park using it.The landscape is completely different now. Attitudes among 20-40 year olds today are far different from those of the 50-60's. Race, gender, and sexual orientation are thought of far differently now than FORTY TO FIFTY YEARS ago. Unfortunately the powers that be (Clintons, Jacksons, and Sharptons) failed to notice that things, indeed have changed. There are still problems, still challenges, but they are nothing like the problems and challenges that faced people 40. 50. & 60 years ago. I'm mean we've gone from trying to get kids into schools to getting them to graduate from those schools, we've gone from lynch mobs to drive by shootings, share cropping to drug addiction, legalizing interracial marriage to single head of household families. Of which my future PODUS was a product.

We need a new road map for this country and I still think Barack Obama has got it.

Again, I ask-once you get past the soaring rhetoric and the Oprahfied happytalk campaign, what's substantively really there? He already has had to blur his tax plan(which he probably scratched out on a cocktail napkin). If a guy cannot even decide whether $100K or $200K is "rich"-a serious question for most families with 2 incomes- what really is he thinking at all? This whole "Obama is aloof" meme is really indicative that there isn't much to him once you get past the shiny candy shell rather than some great mystic This is very similar to Clinton's 1992 campaign, blathering on about "change" and "agents for change" . It's the same freaking thing; a coventional tax&spend liberal socialist with a better package.These guys-all of them-have focus-grouped a few words, hit them every speech and think that's some great trick.

"Change" indeed. Sheep!

That was a beautiful piece you wrote about your wife and your tenth anniversary. . .congratulations and may you have many more!

Bugg,

If we can agree that the line between the "rich" and the "poor" is a moving, shifting line that tracks the distribution of income rather than the political rhetoric of either party, there might be some objective data to consider. If, on the other hand, "rich" and "poor" is more a matter of "us" vs "them", why bother trying to find consensus?

But to ask that question is to answer it. If it is meaningful to have greater household income greater than four out of five households, census data that break out incomes into quintiles could be such a delineation . . . but I doubt it. We all think of ourselves as "middle class;" my household income couldn't be all that much more or less than the typical American. But if your household income exceeds $100K, welcome to the economic elite. And rather than argue about where the line should be, consider how well (or poorly) 80% of us get along with less.

Racial bargain: what? ? I didn't follow the argument. But I do think that Obama symbolizes a step forward, progress, if you will, away from the race issues of the past generation. Not everything is solved, not by a long shot, but it is past time to quit rehashing the same arguments and counterarguments.

For those of us who are younger, multiculturalism is a done deal, not something to be agonized over. Our American idealogy of justice and freedom and tolerance should trump all ethnicity and religion - it is what makes our nation unique. (Though an argument can be made that English profiency for all citizens and residents would be for the greater benefit of all.) I myself am part Mexican - by ethnicity, not nationality, as much of that branch of the family has been on United States territory for quite a bit longer than it was United States territory. The cultural factors of honor and family loyalty from that side of the family lay strong enough claim on me that I typically identify myself as Hispanic instead of white, if forced to choose between the two, though to be honest, I'm a bit of an outsider to both groups.

As far as expertise goes: our current President demonstrated very little knowledge of foreign policy when campaigning. I would argue that knowledge and expertise in that field is of paramount importance to the leader of the Free World. Obama not only knows the subject, he has lived it. You can fault him on many other areas, but not that.