I originally posted this back on April 30… Seemed appropriate to repost it in light of some of the talking heads’ “concerns” aired earlier this evening…

(With apologies to Mike Royko… and, apparently, Pat “anti-copy and paste” Hickey…)

A few weeks back Arch posted an old Mike Royko column which, at the time, attempted to burst the balloon of racism swirling around a Chicago mayoral race which included then-candidate Harold Washington. Arch’s celebration yesterday of the 25th anniversary of the late Harold Washington’s swearing-in as the first black mayor of Chicago reminded me again of that Royko piece.

In light of the issues some Americans are saying they have and other Americans are pretending they don’t have with a certain 2008 presidential candidate, it seemed like it would be interesting to adapt the Royko column for the modern day. What would Royko have written if he were writing about the 2008 presidential election. One can only imagine…

So I told Uncle Chester: Don’t worry, Barack Obama doesn’t want to marry your sister.

That might seem like a strange thing to have to tell somebody about the man who may be the next President of the United States. I never had to tell Uncle Chester that President Bush (either one) or President Clinton wouldn’t marry his sister; though he might still have been cautious about Mr. What Is the Definition of “Is”.

On the other hand, no other President, in the long and storied history of America, has had one attribute of Obama.

He’s black. It appears to be a waste of space to bother pointing that out, since every American knows it.

But, just as with the Irish-shade-of-white Kennedy brothers’ Catholicism, you can’t write about Barack Obama’s candidacy without taking note of his skin color.

Yes, he is black. And that fact is going to create a deep psychological depression in many of the white people — still the majority demographic — across this great country in towns and counties and cities and states, each big and small.

Eeek! The next President of the United States could be a black man!

Let’s all quiver and quake.

Oh, come on. Let’s all act like sensible, adult human beings.

Let us take note of a few facts about Barack Obama.

First, Obama was born in an era when America was still struggling to move beyond an earlier time in which white folks lynched people in some parts of the United States. By “lynched,” I mean they took a black man out of his home, put a rope around his neck and murdered him by hanging. Then they went home to bed knowing they were untouchable because the sheriff helped pull the rope.

Obama’s youth was spent, in part, overseas and in states where the civil rights struggles did not flare up into Bloody Sundays. Even so, those iconic images of police dogs and fire hoses, of marches and voter registrations, of billy clubs and tear gas clouds flowed steadily as Obama grew up.

Indeed, before he would be 10 years old, a young Barry would bear witness right along with our roiling nation to assassination after assassination as those flying the banner of change were gunned down again and again.

Obama certainly benefited from the toils of that time; but as even he notes it can still be difficult for him to hale a cab and many white people to this day believe he is only where he is because of some unnamed quota system rather than his own merits.

I think that most of us – white, privileged, the success road wide open to us – might have turned into haters had we grown up witnessing those atrocities year after year and become adults with the leftover vestiges of such divisiveness still haunting the halls and streets of our nation.

Obama didn’t turn into a hater. Instead, he developed a capacity for living with his would-be tormenters and understanding that in the flow of history there are deep valleys and heady peaks.

He went to one college and then another as he earned his degree. Then he went to Harvard’s law school, at a time when blacks were still as common as alligators there (though it was improving). And he became the first black man to head the Harvard Law Review, a fact which still turns heads to this day considering this achievement happened not all that long ago at a university which is older than our nation.

Had Obama embodied a different personality, he may have tied in with a good law firm (he had plenty of high-paying offers), sat behind his desk, made a good buck and today would be playing golf at a private country club – a comfortable, reasonable life.

But for Obama that wouldn’t sit well with how he had been raised. Rather, he chose to use his law degree to work by applying his legal acumen in community organizing and improving the lives of average and even down-trodden folks.

Being no dummy, he gravitated toward politics and the Democratic Party of the city in which he made his home, even if he still had to navigate the last workings of that big city’s weakening machine to prove his mettle as a campaigner and legislator.

And he went somewhere. Come on, admit that, at least, even while you brood about a black man becoming your next President.

He became a state legislator. Then a United States Senator.

I’m still enough of an idealist to think that most people who become members of the Senate are at least a cut or two above the rest of us.

And even his critics say that as a state legislator and as a U.S. Senator, he was pretty good.

So I ask you: If Abe Lincoln is qualified to be President after holding no higher office than Congressman (and having also been an Illinois state legislator in the years prior) and if JFK was qualified as a ‘youthful’ Senator himself, what is the rap on Barack Obama?

And I also ask you: If Hillary Clinton is qualified to be President after only 8 years experience as a Senator (and no other elective experience) and an earlier 8 years as First Lady (the experiences of which she now appears to routinely “embellish”), what is so unthinkable about a man holding the Oval Office after being a state legislator for 8 years and a U.S. Senator for 4 (with significant Federal legislation under his belt positively affecting both the foreign and domestic spheres)?

The fact is, Obama’s credentials for this office meet or exceed those of George W. Bush, U.S. Grant, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover and many of those who have held the office of Commander-in-Chief.

W was governor in a weak-governor state barely longer than Obama has been in Federal office, and half the time Obama has been in elected office overall. Grant was a war hero, reported to be a drunk, doled out patronage like parade candy and tolerated (and even defended) scandal after scandal by officials in his Administration the results of which were millions of dollars stolen by White House officials. A lawyer by trade, Taft had been appointed (not elected) governor of the then-US held islands of the Phillipines and later Cuba for barely a few years, along with an overlapping stint as Secretary of War. The scandal-plagued Harding had been a state legislator and a US Senator whose friends maneuvered him into a compromise nomination for president. With his background as a mining engineer, humanitarian Hoover’s highest office before being elected to the White House was Cabinet Secretary.

All became President. And America has seen her way through the ups and downs of each (as well as their aftermaths).

Some of these Presidents (as with all 43 of them) were remarkable men (indeed, Taft went on to reach his life’s goal — Supreme Court Chief Justice), others were pitiful, and the bulk just so-so. But during the years of their elections the nation didn’t have a tizzy over the color of their skin (only the content of their character).

But this spring, many (not all, not even most) of our nation’s citizens are gape-jawed at the prospect of Senator Obama becoming President Obama.

Relax, please. At least for the moment. There is time to become tense and angry when he fouls up as President – as anybody in that pressure cooker job inevitably will do.

Until he fouls up, though, give him a chance. The man is a United States citizen, with roots deeper than most of us have in this country. He is a 47-year-old Chicagoan who has been in politics and community organizing most of his life.

He is a smart, witty, politically savvy whippersnapper. He is far more understanding of the fears and fantasies of America’s whites than we white folks are of the frustrations of America’s blacks.

The nation isn’t going to slide into the ocean. The sun will come up today and tomorrow, and your real estate values and stock portfolios and job prospects won’t collapse because he is running (the incumbent and his party’s policies have already seen to that). History shows that those parameters in a country like America improve over the long haul, no matter who is President.

He’ll fire some Cabinet Secretaries, hire a few new ones, and the earth won’t shake under us.

He might hire some jerks. I haven’t seen a President who hasn’t. They don’t learn. In the months before Bush the Younger was first elected, many opined: “How he does will depend on the kind of people he surrounds himself with.”

W surrounded himself with Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and other unitary executive fetishists. With his poll numbers below freezing Pres. Bush is getting what he deserved.

If Obama is smart, which I think he is, he’ll surround himself with the very best talents and minds available. And they’re available. If not, we’ll survive and we’ll throw him out in 2012.

Meanwhile, don’t get hysterical. As many have said over the past fifteen-plus years, if we survived the Clenis, we can survive W (even though many have often wondered if we will).

And if we survive W, we easily can survive a real, live former professor of Constitutional Law, US Senator Barack Obama.

Who knows, we Americans might even wind up liking President Obama.

(Again, apologies to Mike Royko for slobbering all over his to-the-point Harold Washington column.)