I simply want to puke when McCain says he’s a conservative because I know that many voters are content to remain so barely informed that they will believe him.

Now, I have proof. Thanks to the Center for Immigration Studies, I can show exactly how badly Republicans have chosen:

Poll: Voters Unaware of Candidates’ Immigration Positions

Of McCain voters, 35 percent mistakenly thought he favored enforcement that would cause illegals to return home, another 10 percent thought he wanted mass deportations, and 21 percent didn’t know his position.

Doing even a half-decent job on the math here scares me greatly. More than half of those who voted for McCain were under the misapprehension that he’s actually in favor of enforcing all of our immigration laws and would do what is right by Americans before he accommodates aliens. Now, I can understand that there would naturally be a few, or maybe even a bit more than a few, Republican ignoramuses who might not pay requisite attention to a candidate’s true positions on a critical issue or two and cast a ballot in ignorance. But a majority?!!! Please say it isn’t so!

The article goes on to point out that:

Pro-enforcement voters have a greater intensity of views than supporters of legalization. Among Republicans, almost nine out ten who favored causing illegals to return home said they strongly supported that view; on the other hand, fewer than half of Republicans who backed legalization strongly supported that view.

Put the two poll factoids together and you have the saddest commentary about the conservative side of our electorate I’ve ever seen. Not only did more than half of Republican primary voters not know that McCain is on the opposite side of the immigration issue from their desires, 90% of those ignorant to the discrepancy considered their enforcement desires to be very important to the sort of governing they expect to see going forward. These are the sorts of people who would hire a well-known neighborhood child molester to baby sit their kids. I’m not kidding. There could be posters with pictures of the sicko plastered throughout the neighborhood and they’d still invite the offender in the door because he doesn’t seem all that dangerous in person.

Considering the fact that McCain has built his presumptive nomination upon not much more than lies, deceit and misdirection, what might we expect from this venal old sack of excrement if he’s elected? Honesty? The truth? Really? I’ve said all along that this “straight-talking” shifty bastard is morally unfit to even mow my lawn. I would not let my child be in his presence for a nanosecond for fear that his ideology might actually stem from some contagious viral condition. Sometimes it seems to me that only a brain-resident virus could cause otherwise careful adults to engage in such risky behavior at the polls as casting a vote for John McCain.

Those of truly conservative mind who voted for John McCain while fully aware of his stands can only be deemed pathologically irrational. There simply is no rational thought process that might lead any stewardship-minded person to support a candidate who promises change that will destroy ancient cultural foundations and threads of thought that created the very brand of civilization, the only brand of civilization, that has given the world more bounty and good than any other brand that came before it.

McCain represents proof that, both outside and inside conservatism, America is succumbing to a very weird and dangerous sort of imposed tolerance. Framing it by example, I’ll offer this: On one hand, we teach our children to look both ways before crossing the street because it makes sense in keeping them safe. We teach them to be wary of strangers for the same reason. We bust our asses to assure that they are properly affected toward morally straight and intellectually strong paths, knowing that there are good and bad things in this world that require their careful discernment if our human lineage is to be carried forward. We take great care in imbuing in our next generations an awareness of the essential truth that that carrying our lineage forward is the Godly point of our being here in the first place.

Yet many of us don’t extend such care-centered thought process to the political decisions we make. We carelessly give support to would-be leaders, like John McCain, who would set ancestry and heritage asunder while insisting that making a place in our society for the undifferentiated everyman is somehow the conservative thing to do. I had hoped that deep down, conservatives in America would know better. Needless to say, I’m very disappointed.

It appears we are about to sit idly by and let government tinker with the very basis of our civilization out of some irrational and overly-optimistic faith in the goodness and infinite compatibility of all men, all cultures and all races. Many of us simply buy into the awful and decrepit notion that America is so much a “nation of immigrants” that selectivity and discernment between peoples must not be allowed. Politically corrected, we march in lock step toward our own dissolution as a heritage while ignorant to the fact that there is no basis for any of this.

Sadly, electing a president like John McCain is the logical next step in our lemming-like race to the cliffs.

Going forward, I dub this speech the “I am the magic negro sermon.” In his sermonizing, Obama attempts to garner the same mystical powers as a Jedi knight might try to alter the thoughts of others. So, without further ado, here’s my annotated version of Obama’s latest rhetorical gyration:

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

[I am the magic negro, and I want to remind you that] two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. [You will forget that there were several generations of British citizens who were here, becoming uniquely American on their own before they became American patriots and severed the bonds with the mother country.]

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. [You will remain ignorant to the fact that it was these first American generations who questioned the morality of the practice of slavery. You will not know it was their sentiments that lit the first spark of antipathy for the practice, and that eventually led to slavery being repudiated in most of the world. You will not think about the Africans who captured, enslaved and sold into bondage their racial similars. You will ignore that slavery is still a trade among the descendants of the Black Africans who sold most Black Americans' ancestors to white men with ships.]

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – [I am the magic negro, and it is my destiny] to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren. [As your personal magic negro, I will make sure that all are made to believe in the relative equality of every culture, regardless of what common sense might deem useful for consideration in opposition to that belief.]

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. [You will not pay attention to the fact that the belief in the inherent goodness of man is at the root of every evil socialist scheme ever foisted upon a people on this earth.] But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black [bigamist, careless, and drunkard] man from Kenya and a [lunatic, leftist] white woman from Kansas [who wrote a 1000 page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java; aside from that, she was as pure and completely American as Dorothy from Kansas]. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners [you will ignore that mile-wide chip on her shoulder ] – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. [I am the magic negro, after all, and you will be conned both by my story and by my bizarre multicultural origins.]

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one. [As magic negro, I am allowed to discuss genetics on this stage, but if elected you will look the other way when I come down hard on anyone who tries to point out that there are significant genetic differences that matter between the bloodlines of ancient tribes that carry forward to today.]

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for [a con man to sell them] this [bogus] message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country [where they don't have any experience in day-to-day dealing with other non-magic negros or other minorities that lack my mystical powers; they're easy to fool]. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans [who are eager to erase every vestige of heritage because all American ancestors were evil, and southern ancestors were particularly evil].

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign [duh!]. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black’ or “not black enough.’ We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well [I am the magic negro and I condemn such polling despite the fact that looking for traits that distinguish races and ethnicities was a fine tool to use toward the imposition of multiculturalism on what before 40 years of recent leftist multicultural insinuations was an almost fully-homogenous nation of European descendants].

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn[; I expected this, so I had this sermon deftly steeled away in my bag of mind tricks.]

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap [you will ignore the obvious truthfulness of this point]. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike. [You will particularly ignore the fact that my church doctrine teaches that Jesus was a black man. That this has not become an issue is further proof my my magic negro-ness - whew!]

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy[, and my magical powers are proving strong enough for me to weasel out of this]. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed. [You have repressed memories of your pastor reading from Mein Kampf, and I will help you find them.]

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity [for I cannot be elected if my mojo does not work in fooling people into believing in myriad false unities]; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all. [You will not notice that it was multiculturalism that made us most vulnerable to attack on 9/11 and makes us too weak to profile Arabs in airports.]

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way. [You will not note that my faith is aligned with those who believe that Jesus was a black man or that it has roots in African and Latin American socialist religious dogmas.]

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith [the black Jesus, socialist one], a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears [you will ignore the half-million white American brothers who killed each other, filling the soil with their blood]; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.’ [And, one day, my wife might be proud of her nation because of it.]

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America. [You will cease being repulsed by it.]

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me [like Billy Carter, but selling hate instead of beer.] He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. [I am very good at sticking my fingers in my ears and singing "I can't hear you ...la, la, la" in my head!]

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. [You will believe that were it not for this dichotomy, I would not have my magic powers.]

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. [You will believe that it is not.] I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality [in ways that are inconvenient to my campaign; you will believe only the distortions that are convenient to my ascendancy to the throne].

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. [Those of you who are white will believe in your particular need to be perfected in this regard, for I will expand hate crime laws and make hate thought a criminal offense.] And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’ We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country [You white folks will come to know it innately, even the most hyperbolic elements of it]. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students. [You will ignore every bit of common sense that indicates that there are things outside of education that cause attaining equality in outcomes to be intractibly impossible; this is necessary so that I can spend more of your money on gilted projects like those I've been promoting my entire adult life.]

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. [You will believe that all of this is the white man's fault, but never speak of it in these terms.] That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities. [You will believe that racism is the only explanation for it.]

[You will believe the following nonsense to be fully expository of all that plagues black America to he very core of your being.] A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races. [You will believe this mitigates whatever negative reaction you may have toward my soul-maker, Rev. Wright and toward all Black Liberation Theologists. You will elect a clever one!]

[Pay no attention to the Jedi mind trick I'm about to turn here.] In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. [You agree with this, so you must agree with me entirely.]

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. [I am counting on John McCain being weak about pointing out my problems in this regard. He is the walrus.] But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism. [You will not recognize anti-racism for being the powerful evil that it is.]

[To make my magic negro-ness less obvious, I must reach out to traditionalist conservatives of the anti-corporatist sort, so here goes:] Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own. [Even magic isn't perfect, but you will not notice.]

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. [You will believe that since this sounds nice, I will not be divisive or retributional if you elect me; you will believe that I will ignore my wife.]

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny. [You will believe that only I, the magic negro, can bring this about.]

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. [You will feel fine in knowing that while I dismiss my spiritual father here, my book is named after one of his sermons. You will see no problem or irony or quibble with this. None.]

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams [you will ignore the actual expense and government intrusion necessary to embark on Quixotic quests to bring these undoables about]; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper. [You will ignore this part and every other socialist part of my sermons.]

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us [You are to remain ignorant that Islam has no golden rule]. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well. [Kumbaya!]

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism [You will be offended when some people will mock and Fisk my rhetoric here, especially those who point out my magic negro-ness]. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. [Obviously, the only way out of this is to elect me, your magic negro.]

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.’ This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together. [I am the only one who can do this, for I am the magic negro. Women swoon and faint when I speak; I am the fifth Beatle. I am the Walrus.]

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit. [You will believe that this fodder is actually something that only I can attain for you.]

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election. [You will not notice that the young have not yet broken free of indoctrination that suffocated their youth in a stew of leftist revisionism that encouraged them to hate their ancestors.]

[As with all good Jeremiad sermons, I'll end this with a parable to make you feel good about me and put salve on those wounds that the horrific truth about my faith has picked open.] There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.’

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins. [I am the magic negro. I am the light. I am the way. I am the egg-man. Koo, Koo, Koo Joob!]