Barack Obama is set to name his running mate any day now, and the conventional wisdom is that the Democratic presidential nominee needs to go with a white guy to balance the ticket.

That’s a safe bet given how Obama’s opponents are leaping high in their efforts to exploit the senator’s “otherness,” you know, a guy who looks black with a father from Kenya and who grew up in Hawaii has no business being president. McCain is tapping into this angle with his whole theme of how he’s going to give this country “the American president America deserves.”

Obama’s exoticness is hardly a new subject. It came up during the Democratic presidential fight between the Illinois senator and Hillary Clinton. The Clintons brought up this theme in subtle ways. If it been up to key Hillary adviser Mark Penn, the angle of Obama’s “otherness”  would have been a much stronger campaign theme.

In the current issue of The Atlantic magazine, Penn is shown to loudly advocate for the need to  play up Hillary’s supposed “American roots” over those of Obama. Penn believed Obama’s multi-ethnic background and his failure to fit into Norman Rockwall Americana “expose a very strong weakness for him.”

“All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultured and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050,” Penn wrote in a March 2007 e-mail to Hillary Clinton, a copy of which was made available to The Atlantic.

Actually, that would be 2042, the year in which the Census Bureau predicts that Americans who identify themselves as Hispanics, blacks, Asian, American-Indian, native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will make up a majority of the U.S. population. But why wait to party like it’s 2042 when in 2008 we can elect a president who looks black, but had a white mother and grew up in Hawaii after spending some of his youth in Indonesia?

And then there’s the flip side. Here we have a guy who was mostly raised by white grandparents from Kansas, (one of whom was a World War II combat veteran), and left for the mainland to make something of himself by attending Harvard Law School and eventually settled in the heartland, (Chicago). He would serve as an Illinois state legislator, just like Abraham Lincoln. Yet,  to hear Mark Penn tell it, this guy, (Obama), “lacks American roots.”

The United States may be going multiethnic by 2050, but we’re still in 2008, so that means a black guy running for president still has to prove he’s sufficiently American. It surely isn’t fair, buy hey, that’s the breaks. An irony in this whole plot is that McCain was born in Panama, (Canal Zone), grew up in different locales as the son of a Navy officer, and doesn’t really hail from any one place.

No problem, because no one is questioning McCain’s American credentials, nor should they given his much explored years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam era. Aside from that hero angle, Republicans, (of which McCain is one), have long been masters of using symbolism and transparent shows of patriotism, (remember the first George Bush campaigning in a flag factory), to make Democrats look like weenies and Communists.

That whole GOP production is going full force and will surely be stepped up between now and November. If the GOP can make poor Michael Dukakis look like a Greek Commie, (harken back to 1988), just imagine what they’ll do to a guy named Barack Obama with all of his “otherness,” and tailor made biography for gossip and Internet-driven falsehoods.

That’s the conventional wisdom anyway. For an America headed for ever more diversity, the 2008 presidential campaign may be one last great stab to make this country like it use to be, or at least strive for that illusion. That Obama has been able to get this far is stunning, and perhaps we ought to give this country its due for expanding the pool of where major presidential candidates come from.

Still, no use in pushing the enevelope too far. It’ll probably be Obama-Biden or Obama-Bayh as the Democratic in 2008. Who knows what it will look like in 2042.

- R. Daniel Cavazos 

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