What’s the Matter with Kansas may have been an impossible book to read, but its central point is unassailable: In a country filled with the profoundly stupid, emails spreading lies and commercials arguing ridiculous things, instead of debating our future on this planet, can have a huge effect on who wins elections.  Were this a competitive election (which it is not, solely because of George W. Bush, the savior of the Democratic Party), this would have been the week that Senator Obama’s campaign started to unravel, not based on reason, but on inanity.

Why, they keep asking, does Senator Obama consistently run behind the generic Democrat?  Why, given all that has happened, the obvious desire for change, the antipathy toward an almost historically loathed president, is Senator McCain only a half dozen or so points behind Senator Obama?

His message doesn’t resonate, they cluck on Stephanopulis.  Americans are uncomfortable with him.  Heartland, too European, most inexperienced since ummmm, oh, yeh, Bush, but....

The answer to all of this is very easy to divine, but, before we get there, keep the following in mind.  Even the notoriously pro-Republican Rasmussen has Senator Obama on the verge of sealing an electoral college victory.  There is landslide in the air, almost everyone knows it, and it will likely occur.
 
But, but, but...

Barack Obama is the son of a black man which, in this country, means he is black, a Negro, a member of the race which was enslaved by half the country when it was founded.

We have come a long way since the first four score and seven years of slavery-infested politics, and a civil war, and then another hundred years of race-infested politics until, while mourning the murder of a president from New England seeking to resolve this issue once and for all, Congress enacted, and a president from Texas signed legislation that both interjected new guarantees of fairness and law in the protection of the rights of the formerly enslaved race, and converted the solid South from being ritually loyal to the Democratic Party (the party that all but destroyed itself over slavery) to being ritually loyal to a Republican Party that abandoned what it had once stood for, to collect the votes of the most racist among us.

That’s why.

(As noted perhaps too many times in the stuff I deposit here and there, such as this one, I believe this to be the central issue of this election and the vast majority of them since we first started having contested elections when Jefferson defeated President Adams.)