(continued)

Of course, the famously Kennedy-esque Obama bears little resemblance to any of these racial fish-out-of-water clichés. But he does demonstrate a certain ability to keep it real that provides a point of contrast to the painstakingly calculated positions laid out by white politicians of either party. Take the acknowledgment in his memoir that he's done "a little blow" (not "cocaine," mind you, blow) and smoked his share of weed. His rather, um, blunt admission to New Yorker editor David Remnick—"I did inhale. That was the point."—brings to mind the scandalized response of Mays Gilliam's handler to one of his stump speeches: "Are you insane? You can't just go out in front of people and talk!"

The not-so-subtle inference: You can if you're black.

At precisely the same time Chris Rock was portraying the street-smart, comical hustler-in-chief (a role played to perfection, come to think of it, by Reverend Al Sharpton), a rather different black leader of the free world could be found on TV's 24. President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) was courageous but humble, masculine yet vulnerable; a classic example of the stoic black authority figure tackled by Jones in The Man and Morgan Freeman in 1998's Deep Impact, not to mention just about every judge in every courtroom drama produced in the past 20 years. Curiously, not long after Powell made his case for war, Palmer found himself in a similar predicament. Presented with evidence that a Middle Eastern axis of evil was trying to nuke us, Palmer was under pressure to retaliate. He decided to hold out for irrefutable proof (where do screenwriters get this stuff?), the upshot of which was that he was removed from office by his own cabinet for being a wuss. A few "hours" later, Jack Bauer rode to the rescue, Palmer was reinstated, and his guilt-ridden colleagues offered to resign. As the season climaxed, Palmer did what blacks on the big and small screen pretty much always do: He forgave the white guys.

This, of course, is also Obama's big selling proposition, to whites anyway. Just maybe he'll grant them the pardon they've been craving for so long—absolution for having enslaved, oppressed, disenfranchised, and ripped off blacks for several centuries—and set them free at last. Obama's unspoken promise to do so gently, without rancor, may be why whites are so drawn to him.

Then there's, of course, his aisle-reaching empathy.

"I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush's eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him," Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope. "That's what empathy does—it calls us all to task."

Wait, empathy for Bush? From a liberal black dude? Maybe we can all get along.




This article originally ran in the March 2007 issue of . For a risk-free issue, click here

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