Obama and Two-faced Mulattoes

I've come to know three mulattoes in my life. Two quite well and Barack Obama is the third. All three are dynamic - intelligent, with versatile personalities that make for good company, driven, and amoral to the core. - Not particularly immoral, just sharp at being able to rationalize any action.

Perhaps it's that it fundamentally roots in the fertilized plasticity of their personality - a personality that was born of necessity by having to shape and reshape its way through such different social landscapes (the white world and the black) - that such varying justifications, shifting mores, and smooth hypocrisy sync so effortlessly into expediency? Throughout their lives they had to turn on, then off, then on again different accents, cadences, senses of humor, sensibilities, the way they walked, their entire body language and posture. They are actors, all three.

You can see Obama talk one way in front of a white audience, another way in front of a black audience. You can see him look debonair though reserved at one moment, then fist-bumping and "dusting his shoulder off" alla Jay-Z the next. You can see how easily and (what is quintessentially Obama) how self-righteously he throws off public financing, though he just months earlier pledged to accept it. - He can convince you that he is black. Or he can convince you that he is white. This is the root of his talent. He's honed it his whole life. And now he's transmogrified this skill to convince you that he is presidential, despite having no experience and sometimes questionable positions. Talented, no doubt! But also shifting sand.

His talent is most remarkably on display when he slyly preempts potential criticisms against him by boldly holding them out in plain view, letting people see them and think about them, and thereby making such criticisms boring, "taking the sting out of it" as it were, or sometimes almost magically twisting such criticisms into just one more spice to his candidacy. Talk about "hanging a lantern on your problems!"

May this shtick be his downfall too? Will he hold out America's problems (as he holds out his own) to the public one too many times or too vociferously? America is a proud country. She does not take well to others holding her out. And McCain is a war hero. We are proud of him. We know he is American. And American plays in America. So if Obama is not careful, he could misstep by mistaking his talent for America's. And his name and background do not help his cause, it could onlt help to "other-ize" him. Only time will tell.