Here Comes the Race Race (Hillary and Obama are Neck & Neck?)

No surprise that the race is finally being flung wide in the open. Given that today's voter is not a person with values, but a democraphic, which, in the case, are politely known as people of color.

Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii. He was not as subjected to the cookie-cutter view of the African-American experience that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would believe he should have lived through.

Hillary Clinton grw up in Park Ridge, IL, an affluen twhite suburb.

Both, in their professional lives, have enjoyed the fruits of Ivy League educations, wealth, and being surrounded by people like themselves.

Obama happens to be black, but, given his early professional experience in Chicago "assisting local churches to organize job training programs for residents of poor neighborhoods." (according to Wikipedia). Additionally, his credibility will be increased as having actually work while yet an unknown. While no one is saying that Barack Obama is living the life of an evangelical Christian, such were te churches he served, and this may boost him among Chicago's black evangelicals.

Hillary has a better campaign machine, meaning she has an infrastructure built on years of building this presidential race. She has people running numbers, analyzing data, and advancing her marketing efforts. Where she strongly and obviously lacks in skin color and religious conviction she maintains a powerful focus on modern statistics.

I say Obama wins this race race by a nose.

Obama, Clinton Battle for African-American Endorsements
ABC News
By JAKE TAPPER and MAX CULHANE.
Feb. 16, 2007 - As Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, heads to South Carolina this weekend for the first time as a presidential candidate, he steps right into a Dixie briar patch of racial politics.

Up to 50 percent of South Carolina's Democratic primary voters are African-American, so the Palmetto State is a state the Obama campaign is targeting. But can Obama count on black voters to vote for a black candidate? Will his race affect the decision-making process of white voters? Such questions are uncomfortable but Obama's credible candidacy forces them into the open.

While a recent ABC News poll indicates that 84 percent of Americans say a candidate being black would not affect their vote, the dirty little secret is what some pollsters and consultants call "the 15 percent lie" — the supposed percentage of whites who tell pollsters they would be willing to vote for a black candidate but in the privacy of the voting booth never actually would. more