So, as we know, the authors of the new new book Game Change talked to Senator Harry Reid, and this came out of their conversations:

He was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama — a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately.

I don’t know, frankly, how offended black Americans (or other “people of color,” if that’s still the kosher terminology as of 2010) are by these remarks, or how offended they ought to be. Sure, it’s likely that if Reid were a Republican he’d already be reduced to footnote in history after saying something like this, but that old double-standard is another issue. People of all colors can make up their own minds about what offends them, naturally. For my part, as a white American (or a person of no color), I’m offended as all hell.

Reid’s remarks are less a comment on Barack Obama than they are a comment on the American people, from Reid’s point of view, and in particular a condescending criticism of white Americans. Reid is saying that most voters in the end will make their decision based on a candidate’s skin color, accent and verbal mannerisms. Reid is saying that most white Americans would simply rule out voting for a candidate with particularly dark skin who spoke with a recognizably black American inflection. I disagree. I would vote in an instant for any candidate who articulated the kind of optimistic Reaganesque conservatism that I would long to see in the White House (or the House of No Color). A pro-life, tax-cutting conservative, one who scoffed at Global Warming and favored a confident and strong foreign policy — such a candidate would get my vote regardless of race, color (or colorlessness) and regardless of verbal mannerisms, ethnic or otherwise. And I don’t care what Harry Reid or anyone else thinks: I believe any such candidate with a talent for communicating these kinds of beliefs could win a national election. I long believed that the first black president in the U.S.A. would be a conservative. Barack Obama found his moment and took it, and proved me wrong, but then he didn’t really run as himself.

So Harry Reid offends me with his characterization of colorless voters like myself. Of-course, this merely gets added to the list of ways in which he does so; a list capped by the abominable act of destruction he is attempting to inflict upon the greatest health care system in the world.

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