The dilemma Barack Obama poses for pragmatic racists

A lot of people are facing a tough November. Barack Obama seems certain to be the Democratic candidate for president. He’s a black guy in a country that continues to host a lot of people who don’t like black guys, especially ones that are smarter than they are and can talk rings around them.

John McCain would seem if not the ideal candidate for racists or anti-intellectuals, at least acceptable in a pinch. But he has a serious problem too: he’s a Republican, and more people dislike Republicans these days than dislike smarty-pants black guys.

That’s because Republicans, when they’re in power, tend to make a complete hash of things. Sometimes, as with Reagan, they more or less get away with it. Other times, as with the current Bush, they screw things up so badly that there’s simply no disguising it.

So the question here is whether Obama can get more mileage from people who are simply disgusted by Republicans than McCain can get from people who hate smart people or black guys or both.

In theory McCain has an advantage because until evolution makes their eyes glow red and their breath stink of sulphur, one can’t really tell just from looking at them that Republicans are walking train wrecks, while Obama, in vogue or out, is visibly a man of color and audibly very bright. So while voters who might have Republican urges have to stop and remind themselves that a vote for a Republican is a vote for chaos, debt, authoritarianism and government by hallucination, voters who are racist or uneasy around smart people are confronted with Obama’s ethnicity and intelligence full time.

Those are this year’s swing voters, if there actually are any: people whose attention spans are too short to remember what Republicans have done to the country during the past eight years, and people who can’t decide whether or not it’s worth voting for the black guy even when the only other option is total disaster. No sock puppet moms or disco dads or whatever.

My own estimate is that if Obama runs an even moderately competent campaign, McCain is toast: old, white, stale, moldy toast. That’s without making any judgements on which way the ADD/racist vote breaks. And that’s of course assuming Hillary Clinton doesn’t have Obama knocked off just as she did Vince Foster, something I’m told she has publicly announced herself to be considering.

Even if McCain sweeps those demographics, enough voters seem to have at least momentarily internalized Bush’s achievements—massive new debt, gobsmacking stupidity, thousands of American soldiers pointlessly killed, wounded and traumatized and etc.— that the race shouldn’t be especially close even with Chris Matthews and his ilk doing the color commentary.