During his CNN special, “7 Weeks to Go,” political commentator Roland Martin cut to the chase:
My choice for president this year is Senator Barack Obama. Why? Because he is simply better for this country and the world. I base my vote on the issues that matter most to me. A lot of you will do the same. There are others who will walk into the voting booth on November 4th and vote for or against the candidates because of race, age, and gender. That's called reality, whether you admit it or not.
Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” told Roland:
The fact that most of us have some conflict about both race and gender. Clearly, a black person is going to get hurt most. It's not so much about…conscious racism…But that's not actually the racism that hurts Barack Obama the most. The racism that hurts him is the fact that even people who don't think of themselves as prejudiced, which is actually most white people…their primary associations to black people, particularly to black men, is on the evening news. They see them hauled off after being --
Westen added:
He's unfamiliar and he's associated with something other than me, other than my values and with all that stuff that's going on in the hood.
For conservative talk radio host, Joe Pagliarulo, it’s not race. It’s just that Obama is not, well, “exemplary”:
I want to say this very quickly, they're not going to vote for this black guy. When Jackie Robinson broke through to Major League Baseball, Branch Rickey took a chance. He took a chance on an exemplary person. I don't think Barack Obama is that exemplary person.
Last weekend, I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival, which was held a few yards from where Robinson met with Rickey and signed an agreement to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Best-selling author Pete Hamill asked Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author Jimmy Breslin whether “there's a line from Branch Rickey to Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama?”
Breslin, who is writing a book about Rickey, said:
Obama should be 20 points ahead. Obviously it's race. There is no other issue. It's black and white…Everything is based on race. This is a race-based election. I don't see anything else.
Breslin said Obama must take the gloves off:
If Obama doesn't want to fight McCain, how is he going to fight Putin?
At a recent campaign event, Obama vowed:
I never throw the first punch, but I always throw the last.
With the race tightening, Obama must land some punches PDQ. Otherwise Sarah Palin and her running mate, John McCain, may have the last laugh.
