It's way too early to predict who will be elected President of our country in 2008. However, if Barack Obama loses the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, or if he loses the presidential election in November, it seems likely (based on the racial paranoia which afflicts large segments of this country) that numerous people will claim that he lost because he was black.
There may be some people in this country for whom Obama's race is considered an important factor. But I'm not one of them.
I'd be happy to vote for Alan Keyes, for example, if I thought he had any chance at all of winning during this election cycle. (In fact, I think Keyes would make a much better candidate than John McCain --- and maybe even a better candidate than Mike Huckabee, although that would be a close call for me.) Unfortunately, I think that the probability of Keyes winning is virtually nil. Even though McCain isn't my idea of the ideal candidate, he's still a much better choice than Obama or Clinton.
There are many issues facing our country, so it's important not to be a one-issue voter.
Having said that, I believe that some issues so outweigh other issues that those issues are pivotal in deciding how one ought to vote. During the antebellum era, that issue was slavery. In my opinion, that pivotal issue is now the abortion issue. In America, abortion has taken roughly 50 million human lives since being legalized in 1973. What could possibly be more important than passing laws (and amending our Constitution) in order to end America's national holocaust?
When it comes to the abortion issue, it really doesn't matter whether the Democratic nominee is Obama or Clinton. The views of both of them on that subject are equally abhorrent. Notwithstanding the fact that Bill Clinton wanted to make abortion "rare," and notwithstanding his written acknowledgment that human life begins at conception, his unwillingness to support pro-life legislation made his alleged dislike of abortion essentially worthless. Hillary's views on that subject are virtually indistinguishable from Bill's.
One doesn't need to be a conservative Republican or a Christian such as myself to understand the importance of the abortion issue. In an article by jazz critic and Democrat Nat Hentoff, Hentoff (a writer for the Village Voice) said that he was appalled by Barack Obama's extremely liberal views on the subject of abortion. (Here's a link to a longer, and earlier, article Hentoff wrote about abortion. Hentoff also wrote an excellent book about the hypocrisy of liberals who claimed to value civil liberties while simultaneously opposing the freedom of conservatives to express their opinions in the public square. The book contained a detailed consideration of the way in which "pro-choice" people suppressed the choice of people to make up their own minds about the abortion issue by hearing both sides of the argument.)
There have been a few rare pro-life Democrats (such as Bob Casey of Pennsylvania or Glenn Poshard of Illinois), but the overall evidence leads me to conclude that the Democratic party as a whole is on the wrong side of the most important issue currently facing our nation. That's particularly true when one considers the shameful way in which the Democratic party (which allegedly values "tolerance" highly) has excluded or marginalized people such as Casey and Poshard time and time again.
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