It's not my opinion, though, this article was written by someone else. And after I give credit to my fellow Wicomico County Republican Dave Parker for passing this along to me, I'm going to post what this person wrote. At the end, I'll tell you a little about the person who penned it - you might be surprised.
This is from the New York Sun:
It's an amazing time to be alive in America. We're in a year of firsts in this presidential election: the first viable woman candidate; the first viable African-American candidate; and, a candidate who is the first frontrunning freedom fighter over 70. The next president of America will be a first. We won't truly be in an election of firsts, however, until we judge every candidate by where they stand. We won't arrive where we should be until we no longer talk about skin color or gender. Now that Barack Obama steps to the front of the Democratic field, we need to stop talking about his race, and start talking about his policies and his politics.
The reality is this: Though the Democrats will not have a nominee until August, unless Hillary Clinton drops out, Mr. Obama is now the frontrunner, and its time America takes a closer and deeper look at him. Some pundits are calling him the next John F. Kennedy. He's not. He's the next George McGovern. And it's time people learned the facts. Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton. Never in my life have I seen a presidential frontrunner whose rhetoric is so far removed from his record. Walter Mondale promised to raise our taxes, and he lost. George McGovern promised military weakness, and he lost. Michael Dukakis promised a liberal domestic agenda, and he lost.
Yet Mr. Obama is promising all those things, and he's not behind in the polls. Why? Because the press has dealt with him as if he were in a beauty pageant. Mr. Obama talks about getting past party, getting past red and blue, to lead the United States of America.
But let's look at the more defined strokes of who he is underneath this superficial "beauty." Start with national security, since the president's most important duties are as commander-in-chief. Over the summer, Mr. Obama talked about invading Pakistan, a nation armed with nuclear weapons; meeting without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who vows to destroy Israel and create another Holocaust; and Kim Jong II, who is murdering and starving his people, but emphasized that the nuclear option was off the table against terrorists - something no president has ever taken off the table since we created nuclear weapons in the 1940s. Even Democrats who have worked in national security condemned all of those remarks. Mr. Obama is a foreign-policy novice who would put our national security at risk.
Next, consider economic policy. For all its faults, our health care system is the strongest in the world. And free trade agreements, created by Bill Clinton as well as President Bush, have made more goods more affordable so that even people of modest means can live a life that no one imagined a generation ago. Yet Mr. Obama promises to raise taxes on "the rich." How to fix Social Security? Raise taxes. How to fix Medicare? Raise taxes. Prescription drugs? Raise taxes. Free college? Raise taxes. Socialize medicine? Raise taxes. His solution to everything is to have government take it over. Big Brother on steroids, funded by your paycheck.
Finally, look at the social issues. Mr. Obama had the audacity to open a stadium rally by saying, "All praise and glory to God!" but says that Christian leaders speaking for life and marriage have "hijacked" - hijacked - Christianity. He is pro-partial birth abortion, and promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who will rule any restriction on it unconstitutional. He espouses the abortion views of Margaret Sanger, one of the early advocates of racial cleansing. His spiritual leaders endorse homosexual marriage, and he is moving in that direction. In Illinois, he refused to vote against a statewide ban - ban - on all handguns in the state. These are radical left, Hollywood, and San Francis co values, not Middle America values.
The real Mr. Obama is an easy target for the general election. Mrs. Clinton is a far tougher opponent. But Mr. Obama could win if people don't start looking behind his veneer and flowery speeches. His vision of "bringing America together" means saying that those who disagree with his agenda for America are hijackers or warmongers. Uniting the country means adopting his liberal agenda and abandoning any conflicting beliefs. But right now everyone is talking about how eloquent of a speaker he is and - yes - they're talking about his race. Those should never be the factors on which we base our choice for president.
Mr. Obama's radical agenda sets him far outside the American mainstream, to the left of Mrs. Clinton. It's time to talk about the real Barack Obama. In an election of firsts, let's first make sure we elect the person who is qualified to be our president in a nuclear age during a global civilizational war.
Any guesses as to who this is? The author is Ken Blackwell, who is now a columnist for the paper, and the piece is entitled "Beyond Obama's Beauty".
I may have tipped this off a little bit with the categories at the top, but Ken Blackwell ran and lost for the Governor's seat in Ohio in 2006. However, had things been as I thought they should be in a perfect world, that would have been the point where Blackwell was wrapping up his second and final successful term as the chief executive of my home state. Unfortunately, the Ohio Republican Party leadership abhors contested primaries and their choice in 1998 was the moderate Bob Taft - a guy who allowed state government and taxation to grow and the one who pretty much ran the state party into the ground by 2006. It was at that point that Blackwell defied the state powers-that-be and contested the primary against establishment candidate Jim Petro. Sadly the damage was done and Blackwell lost handily that November to Democrat Ted Strickland.
Ken was a figure in Ohio politics well before running for governor, though. He first won statewide office in 1990 as Ohio's state treasurer, then became Secretary of State in 1998 after the Republican brass talked him out of the primary fight he just might have won. He certainly had my support because he was by far the more conservative candidate running. But perhaps the Ohio Republican party thought the state and nation weren't quite ready for a black governor at that point.
You see, a half-decade before Michael Steele became a household name in this state, we in Ohio had the conservative black guy in Ken Blackwell. I don't know if they ever threw Oreo cookies at Ken but I'm sure he took his share of abuse from those who share his skin color but not his political philosophy.
What this means is that the article you see above can't be dismissed as racist. It's sad that we still have to deal with this sort of name-calling over forty years removed from the advent of the civil rights era, but there is a class of people out there who depend on these divisions for their living, and even if Barack Obama should become President they're not going to go away quietly.
Besides, I don't recall those people and groups making much of a fuss when Blackwell and Steele both lost their bids for statewide office in 2006. It proves my point that sometimes the civil rights movement is about power more than about race. Luckily thoughtful criticism knows no skin color and Blackwell is right on point with his column.