Obama smears show long road to King's dream

BY ELLIS HENICAN

April 4, 2008

The air is heavy this morning with talk of Martin Luther King.

His speeches, his legacy, his dream -- and a whole bunch of upbeat assessments about the distance we have traveled racially.

Exhibit no. 1: Barack Obama.

Half-black and half-white, didn't he shoot to the top of the Democratic field by attracting supporters on both sides of the old racial divide?

But still.

Overt racial discrimination has grown far less common in the past 40 years. But it's way too soon to declare a post-racial society. It's far too early to say King's work is done.

The ancient human prejudices may doze at times. But that doesn't mean they're dead. Let the darkness fall. Like a quiet vampire at sundown, they'll come rising from the crypt again.

Didn't you hear that eerie creaking sound?

That was the orchestrated uproar over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama's minister said some fiery, even offensive, things. But as those sermon tape loops played on, the oldest racial fears were whipped up again.

Obama took an instant hit in the polls with white voters -- white men especially. He's bouncing back this week. But weren't tough Republican operatives watching? Won't they return even more viciously in the Fall? You know they will.

These are the people who Swift-boated John Kerry, who turned Willie Horton into a household name, the people who understand that race may be absent from the American conversation but it is never long absent from the American mind.

How do I know this? I know it because every day I open my e-mail in-box to another load of lies - about Obama's supposed hatred of America, about his supposed refusal to salute the flag, about the supposed madrasah he attended as a boy.

King had a dream. We all have dreams.

I dream that one day all this really will be ancient history. But I'm not holding my breath. The way this campaign is turning lately, I suspect we'll all be dreaming for a while.