What's so Super?

I thought I might elaborate a bit on my Obama bashing. I was talking to a couple of white cohorts who are totally jazzed about Obama, and mentioned that I didn't like him. They were aghast; after all, as a minority doesn't my melanin compel me to vote for a minority candidate?

I mentioned my dissatisfaction with Obama as a black candidate, which provoked a response that Obama was so good because he wasn't identifiable as a black candidate, he was just another candidate. Yeah, that excites me. Nothing separates him from any other candidate or distinguishes him as a member of a minority group, but as a minority I'm supposed to form an electoral bond with him on a membership basis? What the fuck?

Look, two posts ago I posted this, commenting on a N.M. Supreme Court decision defining Indians as, among other things, "wandering savages, given to murder, robbery, and theft, living on the game of the mountains, the forest, and the plains, unaccustomed to the cultivation of the soil, and unwilling to follow the pursuits of civilized man." I'm firmly of the opinion that the same opinion could be written today, it's just that the prevailing conditions make it politically impossible for a court to be so honest about its views.

Almost two years ago I wrote this post about an attorney who, in oral argument before the N.M. Supreme Court, posed a hypothetical situation where someone goes to an Indian casino and gets scalped in the parking lot. Read that again: gets scalped in the parking lot. One justice said “that’s a little insulting,” but that's the only notice the Court took of the statement. The attorney was never sanctioned, nor any formal notice taken by the courts or the bar, or really anyone. Tell me the "wandering savages" theme doesn't still have some play in this country.

Now, instruct me as to how excited I should be expected to get over an Indian candidate for office who was indistinguishable from the rest of the pack. Who really had no meaningful agenda or policies regarding minorities in general, or Indians in particular. Who was so thoroughly assimilated that friendly white folks embraced him/her because they were just so darned personable, well-spoken, and vanilla that they couldn't be told apart from the white candidates.

I personally liked Edwards, because he at least distinguished between the poor and everyone else, and really poor white people are functional equivalents of minorities. Now I'm left with Clinton and Obama, and I think that Clinton is more competent, which given the last seven years I choose to read as "less dangerous." Sold!