White Man at the New Republic Explains...

(via CBS)

Peter Beinart begins the breakdown with analysis of the black man who got the most pre-Barack White love.

"No one was blunter about this than (Colin) Powell himself. Asked in 1995 to explain his appeal to whites, he volunteered that "I speak reasonably well, like a white person," and, visually, "I ain't that black."

Barack Obama would never put it that way. But he surely understands the uncomfortable subtext behind the adoration being showered upon him by white America. Obama, too, succeeded at a prestigious white institution: Harvard Law School. He, too, is a child of immigration, able to declare in his 2004 Democratic convention speech — in words that could have come from Michael Dukakis or Joe Lieberman (but not from a descendant of slaves, without heavy irony) — that "in no other country on Earth is my story even possible." And he, too, doesn't sound or look too black. Fifteen years ago, a State University of New York political scientist named Nayda Terkildsen doctored photos of a fictitious gubernatorial candidate to make him lighter- or darker-skinned and then showed them to Kentucky focus groups. "The dark-skinned black candidate," she noted, "was evaluated much more harshly than his lighter skinned peer." Powell knew what he was talking about."