It's Obama's Difference, Not His Race...

Democratic running mate Joseph Biden is in the news today. Apparently he's warning the McCain camp against encouraging "fringe people," a reference to the "angry" mobs who are allegedly threatening to Barack Obama.

This is just a few days after Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights veteran who was beaten while demonstrating at Selma, claimed that John McCain and Sarah Palin were "playing with fire" in invoking the George Wallace legacy of racial hatred.

This really is over the top irrationalism, especially since not one Democrat was upset about the left's Trig Palin smears, or Sandra Bernard's unhinged theatrical performances attacking Sarah Palin (warning she'll be gang-raped), or ... well, you get the picture.

The fact is that, as I've found in talking to people, over and over again, including top political science experts, there's very little Jim Crow racism to be found in the voting electorate; and in fact, we might as well see a reverse-Bradley effect pushing Obama over the finish line on November 4.

What bothers people about Barack Obama is not so much his race, but his difference - especially his oppositional difference to American tradition and values.

This passage, from today's New York Times, captures the common aversion to Obama among regular folks:

Race is indisputably a backdrop against which this campaign has unfolded ... but that does not mean opposing Mr. Obama or using harsh words is racist....

“At first I was open to Obama because I thought we needed new thinking about jobs and the economy,” said Burton Reed, a Republican at the rally here. “But the more I heard about him, the more worried I became. He says he’s Christian, but I hear he’s Muslim. And he just doesn’t sound pro-U.S.A. I kind of question his devotion to this country.”

One factor for Mr. Reed and several other Republicans and independents interviewed along the bus route on Sunday was Mr. Obama’s long association and friendship with Mr. Wright. Others said they simply had a hard time relating to Mr. Obama’s background or accepting his political positions, which are widely seen as liberal.

“The bottom line is, he isn’t one of us, and I’m scared to death of him,” said Lloyd Wood, a Republican and farmer in this rural town in southeast Ohio who came to the local Wal-Mart on Sunday for a campaign visit by Ms. Palin, Mr. McCain’s running mate.

“Guns, abortion, homosexuality, religion, protecting Israel, taxes,” Mr. Wood continued. “I feel like he is totally different from where I stand, and I worry what he would do to this country. And listen, I’ve voted for black Republicans before — voted for one for governor last time — but Obama is just this very privileged kind.”

A "very privileged kind"?

That pretty much sums up the basic resistance to Obama we saw during the Democratic primaries, the type of refrain one might have heard around the time the Illinois Senator alleged that working-class Pennsylvanians were likely to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them..."

I think this is what's bothering so many people, including some of the kindest souls you'd ever be lucky enough to meet ... people without a wicked bone in their bodies.

Obama's "hope and change" is just a bit much, and now Democrats are trying to turn everday folks into KKK night-riders, which reveals just how deeply the Obama camp is willing to go in rekindling the racial tensions that have been steadily subisiding since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.