The "safe" V.P. pick for Obama

You’d think these would be times of spiritual tumult for our nation’s bitter racists. After all, a charismatic black man is leading in the polls and has at least a 50-50 chance of becoming our next president.

You’d be wrong.

It turns out the racists have a faith that is sustaining them through what others would perceive as challenging times for people who hate.

I learned this the other night when two bitter racists sat down next to me for a beer. They were in particularly foul moods because the company they work for is in the midst of labor strife and management's included black men among the replacement workers.

“I don’t care what happens, I ain’t never taking any orders from no (and I’ll paraphrase here) African-American!”

I laughed and said, “If the polls are right, we’ll all be taking orders from one of them come November.”

“That’s not going to happen” he said with serene self-assurance.

“What? You think McCain’s going to win? You think voters will prefer his experience? That he can convince voters that his solutions to the economy make more sense?”

“It’s none of that,” he said. “Someone’s going to kill that (paraphrase) African-American. No way he’s gonna ever be president.”

There it is. The unspoken undercurrent of this remarkable political season. Racists are sure that one of their like-minded brothers is going to off Obama.

It’s all starting to remind me of the plot behind the great 1974 Mel Brooks movie, “Blazing Saddles,” where unscrupulous politicians select a black man (Cleavon Little) to become sheriff, smugly certain that the good people of Rock Ridge will kill him before he ever gets the badge pinned to his chest.

The racist mindset’s the same.

That’s why it’s essential for Obama to pick a vice presidential candidate who’ll be more repugnant to racists than even himself.

This is along the lines of why no one in the Democratic party wants to impeach George Bush, who at the very least should be impeached for his persistent and infuriating mispronunciation of the word “nuclear.”

If we impeach him,” or so the thinking goes, “then we get Dick Cheney for president and he’d be worse.”

That makes ol’ Dick a kind of political prophylactic -- and try not to read any more into that line than there already is.

So for his own safety and for the good of the country, I’m urging Sen. Obama to pick someone even more loathsome to the people who hate him.

And that’s Whoopi Goldberg.

Think about it from the racist perspective: She’s black (check). She’s a woman (check). And she’s Jewish (check).

Give her an honorary degree from Harvard and she’ll have it all. Absolutely no one, racist or not, would prefer to see her in the White House over the clearly capable Barack Obama.

So let’s hear it for Obama/Goldberg in ‘08.

Whoopi!