VOICES | Obama's snubbing of Sebelius

Barack Obama’s choosing Delaware Senator Joe Biden as running mate shows, more than ever, Obama’s presidential bid is the most transparently p.c. farce since Colin Powell’s now-I-might-no-I-won’t sham of possibly becoming the first black face in the White House.

Powell jerked everybody around. He got black hopes up all over the place. He scared the living hell out his own party, the Republicans, who wanted him to sit down someplace on the sidelines but didn’t dare so say. Then, at the last minute, Colin Powell, that illustrious poster boy for social progress, called all the suspense off and went home to count his book royalties, which ever so coincidentally happened to soar while the country wonder whether he was going to run.

Obama isn’t frightening anyone. He is, though, pissing the Republicans off, and has the Democrats happy as pigs in slop (except, of course, Hillary Clinton who just can’t seem to take I-lost for an answer). Republicans are mad because they’re up against the poster boy for liberal guilt — in which America is awash. Democrats are glad because they’ve got the poster boy for liberal guilt – and all the votes from “hip” and conscience-struck white folk that brings along with it. And, now that he’s picked Biden, the Democratic patriarchy can breathe a sigh of relief and get on with the business of trying to soundly kick the GOP’s asterisk.

Meanwhile, what the hell happened to all Obama’s noise about change? He wants to change this and he wants to change that, but he hasn’t changed a damn thing about male-dominating political power.

If he’s so stoned out on change, how come he didn’t tap Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to run as vice-president? She has qualifications and agendas that handsomely dovetail with what Obama claims to be about. The 2008 respondent to that nitwit George Bush’s State of the Union address and chair-emerita of the Democratic Governors’ Association, she is serious about education, the environment, and all that good stuff that’s supposed to ring Obama’s bell.

But Obama went and got himself a man, a white one at that. Bringing Sebelius on-board would have gone a long, long way toward reaching the Clinton supporters who are so bent out of shape by her loss that they’re actually planning to vote for John McCain. And it would have forced Hillary to, for once, stop giving lip service to party unity and start walking it like she talks it. Vitally, it would have given Democrats a team the Republican Party couldn’t beat with a stick. It was more important to home-slice, though, that he run a bigger risk of losing the election in order to be one of the boys. One of the big, powerful white boys.

Dwight Hobbes is a writer based in the Twin Cities. He contributes regularly to the TC Daily Planet.