However, I have to ask myself is this nothing more than another case of affirmative action?

Back in the 1970's affirmative action was supposed to help integrate the workplace by catapulting minorities into them. The work of well-intentioned liberals this policy has admittedly had some success in integrating government facilities in the south but has also backfired as the policy gets blamed for every incompetent black put into a position they didn't get by coming up in the ranks and for the most part, rightly so. Its a double-edged sword and a policy that is largely outdated.

I have to ask myself, is this happening again?

Forget about my disagreement with Barack Obama's policies for a second. While he was educated at one of our nations finest schools, speaks with good diction and is a powerful orator, he has little experience beyond that. Furthermore it seems that he cannot speak extemporaneously about any weighty subject, especially when it comes to foreign policy or the economy. While I was not educated at Harvard, nor is my degree in foreign affairs or economics (actually its Computer Science) I can easily see that at best Barack is a paper tiger when it come foreign policy and the economy. While the populist mumbo-jumbo sounds good to joe-uneducated some of it frankly does not even make sense.

Even George W. Bush can do a 3/8th ass that and he is one of the poorest communicators of our time.

What is at stake here is a little more than the usual consequences of Affirmative Action when someone incompetent or incapable is installed which usually are pissed-off employees, loss of productivity and profit and other things of that ilk.

What is at stake this time, is all our nation, our economy, our sovereignty and our livelihoods. Its been argued that he is going to have advisers to take care of that. Maybe so, but do you really want to have a puppet in office? Really?

How many of those advisers will be in the room when he sits down with Achmadinijad. Achmadinijad will run over him. McCain will too if he ever gets a chance to debate him unscripted. [Of course if McCain wins the debate, he will be called a racist and told that like on standard tests, the questions need to be adjusted so that Obama can excel.]

I was born in 1967 so I am not aware of the of the rifle butts and hoses turned on black people by  Democrat governors, Democrat mayors, and Democrat sheriffs during the birth of the civil rights era. I also admit that I don't work on the shop floor and/or in an environment where the uneducated and uncouth (of all colors) get together and act ignorant and racist. I fully understand why I do not have the yearning for a black president that people older than I am do.

"
For those of you in the hood, do you think Barack will make things different or better?
"

For those of you in the hood, do you think Barack will make things different or better? To paraphrase Katt Williams "Music aint gonna start playing hoes aint comin out." Black men (if they didn't know he was president) would say that Barack Obama is bullshit and a sellout for getting an education and challenge his ability to whoop their asses. Black women will continue chose men who have been to jail and had sex with men and prefer men would beat/abuse/cheat on them over someone like Barack. The black churches will continue to tell black people that nothing is possible, their lives are worthless and the whites have nothing else better to do with their own lives than figure out how get them. The schools in the inner city will continue to fail as violent students male and female keep decent teachers away and make what little education they can get impossible. Any proposal for school choice will fall on deaf ears. Crime will continue. And trying to get an education will continue to equate to trying to get shot.

Change? Nothing will change and you know it.

Barack Obama has proven that America is ready for a black president. When a qualified one, not one catapulted to power via Affirmative Action comes along he will have my vote. The stakes are too high. The audacity of hope must give way to the audacity of practical thinking.

Hope is nothing more than an excuse for doing nothing.