Barrack Obama won Texas. Brian williams announced it Tuesday on NBC Nightly News

But, I've heard nary a peep about this. This should be huge news-- that Clinton's big three-state comeback was actually a 2-state draw, that Obama has won a big state with lots of white people in it. I'd figure the Obama campaign, if no one else, would be shouting this from the rooftops.

Why aren't they?

For the longest time I thought only a few friends and a certain dog owner bothered to read this blog. Now I’m thinking the shot-callers of the Republican National Convention may be stopping through here as well, looking for guidance from a guy who writes comic books.

Over the weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attended one of the regular weekly meetings of Americans for Tax Reform, a salon of prominent conservative figures that has never enjoyed the company of a secretary of state before. Absent also from the news are the frequent and ardent denials by Rice that she is in any way interested in the GOP veep nomination.

I’m reasonably sure this is all shill, Rice perhaps doing her mentor George W. a favor by making some noise for John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. I regard a McCain-Rice ticket as highly unlikely and the speculation about it all—no doubt orchestrated by the campaign—as smarmy and manipulative, with a huge potential to backfire on the Republicans.

Rice is obviously being used for her major assets—her gender and her race—in an effort to steal some of the thunder (now devolving into boredom) from the Democratic contest. But, those attributes notwithstanding, Rice brings little to the table that a presidential candidate might actually value. She would be of little help to McCain in states with high African American populations, like Rice’s home state of Alabama, as Rice’s negatives (the war, her loyalty to the president) make her a figure of some controversy among many blacks. While her civil rights and academic resumes are impeccable, her service record to this president and, most especially, support of this war are huge negatives for McCain.

I’m fairly certain Rice is just being dangled out there. A McCain-Rice ticket might be the GOP (or Bizarro World) version of the Dream Team, but I doubt McCain’s temperament makes Rice a suitable partner. I also think both versions of the so-called dream team—McCain/Rice or Hillary/Obama—are particularly dreamy. Both versions are unbalanced and cater to the sensational over the practical. Both Hillary and Obama need a southern white guy with unimpeachable credentials to balance their tickets. McCain needs a southern conservative with charisma and a strong pulse, as McCain’s health issues will doubtless become a major campaign issue. If Mike Huckabee wasn’t so obviously the GOP version of Jimmy Carter, he’d be the obvious choice. McCain needs to link up with precisely the kind of hard-right Republican he personally despises (McCain himself is, despite his claims, more of a centrist than a conservative).

Without some tabackie-chomping redneck at his side, I’m fairly certain the GOP faithful will stay home in November and whoever’s left standing in the Democrats’ sandbox will be sworn in—most likely without the other major candidate as the veep. Holding out hope of a Hillary/Obama or, even less likely, Obama/Hillary ticket is just playing to the orchestra. Condi as running mate is just the party trying to manipulate genuine hopes of some magical, earthshaking change in our political system, when holding out that very hope is, in fact, politics as usual.

I find nothing more difficult to do than to explain racism to racists—black and white. In this nation, racism is so deeply entrenched, so troublesomely institutionalized, that rooting it out may very well be impossible. It will certainly take both time and education. The more worrisome racists, to me, are the liberals who don’t think they’re racist. I live in a town full of people like that. Community leaders, pastors, and yes neighbors whom, were you to point out racist behavior, would externalize their resentment and perhaps their guilt by becoming preemptively and inappropriately angry at you for having pointed it out. In other words, they’d prove they weren’t racist by demonizing and attacking you for having suggested such a thing.

This was the whole embarrassing saga of Geraldine Ferraro, outraged that the “Obama campaign” had smeared her as racist after she suggested Obama would not be where he was were he not a black male. Obama called Ferraro’s remarks, “ridiculous,” but at no point, to my knowledge, did he even *suggest* she was a racist. Still Ferraro went on the offensive, declaring her outrage and villainizing the Obama campaign for playing the race card.

This is the most frustrating part of the discussion: the stupidity. Most especially among liberal whites, educated and affluent whites, who believe they are either beyond or above such things as racism. Which denies the undeniable truth of the institutionalized nature of racism. By “institutionalized” we are talking about something so endemic, so inbred and handed down from one generation to the next, that for me to stand here and tell you I have no struggle with it is either intellectual cowardice or simple immaturity.