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Richardson's Health Plan Wouldn't Raise Taxes
Black Journalists Will Ask If Obama Is Black Enough
Barack Obama tests the "Ice Cream Capital of the World" claim of Le Mars, Iowa. Tomorrow, African American journalists meeting in Las Vegas will discuss whether he's "black enough."
(By Charlie Neibergall -- Associated Press)
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A day before Barack Obama speaks to the National Association of Black Journalists at its convention in Las Vegas on Friday, a forum will be held to ask a question that annoys the Illinois senator's wife: Is he "black enough?"
A session hosted by Michel Martin of National Public Radio, according to NABJ's program, will grapple with "a question that no one else is confronting." The program continues: "This candidate is Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama, and the question he cannot seem to shake -- is he black enough? Is this an unfair question? What is the measure of blackness and who gets to decide?"
In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, published Sunday, Michelle Obama, the candidate's wife, said: "The truth of the matter is that as I was growing up, talking too proper, going to certain schools, people told me that. We are still struggling as a people with what is black," she said.
"The thing that I worry most about . . . is not what it says about me and Barack," Michelle Obama said. "What does it say to our children? That somehow Michelle Obama is not black enough? Well, shoot, if I'm not black enough and Barack's not black enough, well, who are they supposed to be in this world?"
She disputed the notion that Obama's upbringing in Hawaii was different from hers on Chicago's predominantly black South Side.
"He was raised in his grandmother's home, and his grandmother is from Kansas, eating tuna with pickles in it," she told the Sun-Times. "The same conversations that we had around my kitchen table, we have at her house on Christmas. We are not that far apart. It's just that it feels like people have benefited from us feeling and believing that we are far apart."
"I'm fundamentally a girl from the South Side," she said. "I may change the cadence of [my speech], you know if you are home, you're just home, but the stories are the same. I think people want leaders that they can connect to," she said.
-- Perry Bacon Jr.
SOOTHSAYING
Giuliani Predicts Clinton-Obama Ticket
Add another title to the résumé of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani: pundit. Yesterday, Giuliani predicted that Democrats will choose Hillary Clinton to be their presidential nominee and that she will pick Barack Obama to be her running mate.
Campaigning in rural Iowa, Giuliani told reporters, "I think it's going to be a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket." According to the Daily Telegraph, he added: "They will run together because Barack Obama has had such a good showing and it's going to be very hard for her to deny him a place on the ticket."
-- Michael D. Shear
