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deafklaxon

Listed below are comments made by deafklaxon between Wednesday, 21st May 2008 and Wednesday, 21st May 2008.

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Attacking Mrs Obama 03:00am on 21 May 2008 In politics, no accusation is false - veracity, as a substantive issue, being left to campaign historians to sort out. In politics the key question is always deniability. How deniable is the accusation? Let's consider that.

Jeremiah Wright has already cut deeply into Obama's deniability quotient (DQ). Michelle's previous comments qualifying her national pride further erodes the DQ metric. How much more can Obama take before he simply runs out of deniability?

Racism in the U.S. is about fear - the fear of "reckoning" with a slave history. There's a lot of material stratified below that surface and Obama's political opponents know it. Arguably, Michelle's American experience is more authentically "black" than Barack's, so she is a natural target for leveraging it. Michelle will become "the issue" soon; count on it.

Did she have something to say about "whitey"? Maybe - in fact, probably. As with most African Americans, the "w" word is part and parcel of the narrative and no less a shorthand for the country's structural racism than the "n" word is for white Americans. It's part of the reality that Obama's campaign, in my opion, is valiantly attempting to overcome.

These are simply realities. The real question - because it is inevitable in this political season and its answer long overdue in this country - is are we mature enough as a nation to address it? I can only hope - which is the tagline for Barack's presidential bid, right? I like the guy (I'm white) and I'm voting for him.

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