"A White Obama?" The Wrong Question

SDP's Prof. Blanchard joins the Ferraro camp, asking rhetorically, "Would a White Obama have been able to challenge Ms. Clinton?" Blanchard's answer: no, Obama's race is an asset.

I suggest Professor Blanchard and the rest of us pasty tundra dwellers ask Senator Obama himself if being black is an asset. But more importantly, I suggest that Blanchard (like Ferraro) is asking the wrong question. What exactly is "a White Obama"? The question has no answer, like a bad Zen koan (What is the sound of one hand clapping? If Badlands Blue falls in the Potomac and no one is watching, does it still make a splash?).

"A White Obama" -- the question hardly qualifies as parlor entertainment, let alone useful political analysis. What does it mean? A man with exactly the same oratorical abilities? Maybe. The same political positions? Perhaps. But keep working down the checklist: the same experience as an Illinois legislator, campaigner, community organizer, Harvard law student, dark-skinned child born in Hawaii to a Kenyan man who split and a Kansan woman who remarried an Indonesian man?

There the concept of "a White Obama" collapses in meaninglessness. Even if you posit the sci-fi "what if" of a shift one gene to the right and out comes a white son to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., and Ann Dunham, the concept collapses. Different color, different experiences, different life. "A White Obama" makes about as much sense as "a Black Cory Allen Heidelberger" or "a female Bruce Whalen."

Barack Hussein Obama is who he is, like each one of us, the product of his every experience. Race and sex and all the other labels don't in themselves doom or destine anyone to anything, but they do shape us uniquely. To compare the Kenyan-American, male, Christian, slim, straight, Democrat Obama to illogical chimera serves no practical purpose. The real task before us now is to compare him to the very real and unique individuals competing with him for the Presidency.