The Old Guy vs. The Black Guy

One of the wags at The Onion wrote the other day that the number of acceptable phrases that a presidential candidate can use has dropped from 38 at the beginning of 2007 to a mere four. They are:

Thank you all for coming, God bless America, These pancakes are great, and Death to the infidels.

Like all great humor, there is an element of truth to this, which leads me somewhat circuitously to get the jump on what is sure to be one of the more provocative story lines of the fall phase of the 2008 steel cage match for the White House.

That the race will be between a septuagenarian and an African-American.

John McCain's age and Barack Obama's skin color certainly would have come up however directly or indirectly. But we owe a debt of thanks (cough, cough) to Hillary and Bill Clinton for shamelessly lowering racial "discourse" to limbo-bar level.

Perhaps this is just the Clintons' strange way of reaching out to the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency, but all it has done is drive blacks who were on the fence into Obama's arms and further cement their legacy as a destructive team of which I can recall no spousal antecedent in American politics. (John and Abigail Adams didn't behave that way, did they?)

My own view is simple:

Many factors were fair game as to whether Hillary was qualified to be president, but not her gender.

Many factors are fair game as to whether Obama is qualified to be president, but not his race.

Age, however, is an entirely different matter when combined with McCain's refusal to share his health records, and these factors demand to be discussed.