Polls show an incalculably small percentage of voters "won't vote for a black man" for president, although they haven't expressed corresponding enmity toward the skin color of black Justice Clarence Thomas, State secretary Condi Rice, numerous mayors and congressmen, generals and admirals, renowned educators, astronauts, physicians, religious figures, and philanthropists, not to mention black athletes that dominate collegiate and professional sports figures.
There's another "won't vote" group, too -- voters who reject Barack Obama is an "elitist."
Obama is "elitist" to them because he's used his years wisely and fruitfully to write several books, win an Emmy for his "Yes We Can" video, speaks more eloquently impromptu and extemporaneously than most politicians in recent history, was president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, roared from relative obscurity to become the most popular U.S. presidential candidate at home and abroad and is optimistic rather than dour, dark and despairing about the future.
They resent these formidable achievements while so young.
My hunch is they're also conditioned to Washington standards of the past 7 years and regard anything above mediocrity to be impudence. Our current commander-in-chief is widely celebrated and mocked for his malapropisms, linguistic blunders, fractured syntax and grammar and inelegant social graces. His wannabe successor, John McCain, who's avoided being tagged as "elitist," is creating his own image with an inability to read from a (cq) TelePrompTer, confusing Shiite with Sunni Muslims, not knowing which country borders Iraq, and unaware that Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993, among other faux pas, and is just learning about Google.
Remember, Republicans who're maligning Obama as "elitist" have been critical of the "Dumbing Down America," the metaphor for dunce Americans whose world is limited to video games, sleazy behavior of pygmy-brained entertainment figures and absorbing new hip language slang, but can't name their state's capital.
Anyone around for the past several voting cycles should remember teachers and teacher unions being bitterly assailed for declining classroom education. The Far Right has schizophrenically and simultaneously championed tougher federal standards -- No Child Left Behind -- but also contradictorily insisting hands-off of local school boards.
Now the nation has the good fortune of a presidential candidate with unusual intellect, literacy, skills of verbal communication and written composition and geopolitical vision who would bring pride to the office, but instead garners derision as "elitist."
Truth told, isn't "elitist" just a dodge? Don't they dislike Obama really because he's what segregationists of the Old South called "uppity" blacks because they were highly literate, educated and simply wanted their constitutional rights to equality?
