Symbols

Husband and I have been talking some time ago. Americans are obsessed more with the symbol than with what the symbol actually represents. I hope Obama was not elected because he is Black but despite of it.

Even then I still do not completely comprehend the hype. He is half-Black and half-White; how are we to know which part of him got him elected? Maybe the whites voted for him not because they have taken a giant leap forward on their bigotry on race but because Obama is still half-White. Or that a lot of them are irreversible Democrats that they would have voted for Sarah Palin had she decided to cross borders toward the left and carried the Democratic banner instead of Obama.
I understand the intense support from the Black community for Obama but I wonder if most of them realize that Obama did not experience the racial injustices and black prejudices which led Martin Luther King, Jr. to stand up and say enough. In fact, he was not even there. He was in Kenya where the majority was Black and equality between races was not even a national issue. Sure, he's had some brush with discrimination, some of it from his own grandmother. But not to the extent as how some people were playing it up to be.

In the end though, he did not have to and it did not matter. Black or white, the central consideration in the majority of voters was the economy. Consumer spending is lagging, job losses at unprecedented rates and a a major automaker on the brink of brankuptcy, it does not matter what the color of the skin is of the man who will steer America out of this quagmire.
Amidst dimming prospects of the future and depressing (pun?) economic performance, I have to wonder: Did America vote for the man most suitable for the job, or for the man most symbolic of the changing times?

It sure did make a lot of people proud of America--again.