By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. In an exuberant remark that appears to have been ill-advisedly intended to flatter then-Candidate Barack H. Obama, Nevada senator, and U.S. Senate’s Democratic Majority Leader, Harry Reid was quoted to be implying that the fact of the now-President Obama’s being possessed of “a light skin” and having no distinctive “Negro dialect,” well positioned the Kenyan-fathered and white-mothered former Illinois senator for the coveted job of President of the United States (See “Reid Apologizes for Racial Remark About Obama, and Also Sinks in a Poll” Politics Daily 1/9/10). The preceding remarks were reportedly made in the heated run-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. We also learn that Mr. Reid’s observations, which prompted the otherwise diligent and progressive Democratic leader to issue an apology, recently appeared in a book titled “Game Change” and authored by two white writers, namely, Messrs. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. What is sneaky here, though, is not the fact that Senator Reid is alleged to have made the preceding observations, for it is an open secret that the vast majority of white-American voters who supported President Obama’s candidacy, for his current job, did so largely on the strength of feeling comfortable about the fact of Mr. Obama’s not being stereotypically African-American. On the other hand, while likable mainstream – or white – American leaders like former President Bill Clinton desperately and mischievously attempted to pin the “Nigger” label on the first African-American to be elected President of the United States, such as alluding to the largely symbolic fact of the Rev. Jesse Jackson having also clinched the support of Black-majority South Carolinians in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Reid, though officially undecided at the time of making the remark attributed to him, actually went on to endorse Mr. Obama’s candidacy. Needless to say, Mr. Clinton had, logically, decided to play the proverbial uxorious husband, in Miltonian terms, of course, by voting for Mrs. Hilary Rodham Clinton. In short, our contention here is that Senator Reid was simply floating with the tide of liberal white-American prejudice when he located his “comfort zone,” as it were, with the former Chicago state assemblyman and community organizer. We must also not lose sight of the grim fact that even prominent African-American leaders, such as New York City’s Charles Rangel and State Governor David Paterson, had made it pointedly clear that under no circumstances, whatsoever, would they endorse the candidacy of Mr. Obama, whom they evidently reckoned as a poacher or brazen political outsider. Significantly, the Rev. Alford Sharpton, a civil rights protégé of the Rev. Jesse Jackson (and actually the latter himself) would also wonder loudly and publicly before the mainstream-American media as to whether Candidate Obama appeared and behaved “black enough” to win the endorsement of the founder-president of the National Action Network (NAN). Messrs. Rangel and Jackson would also make snide and tawdry remarks about the soon-to-be President of the United States. We must also boldly and honestly take into account the fact that going into the presidential prize-fight, both at the primary and bi-partisan levels, Mr. Obama was not too naïve, stolid, innocent or totally unmindful of the fact of his mixed racial background redounding to his good fortune, especially in an era of gross and perennial white-presidential mismanagement when the American people were virtually prepared for almost any other kind of “untested” leader but one in the patently objectionable mold of the ever-bumbling President George W. Bush. We know this also because Mr. Obama began calling himself “a mutt” – or mixed-breed – in the immediate wake of his landmark election as the first African-American spearhead of the lone global superpower. Interestingly, throughout his electioneering campaign – both in the primaries and the bi-partisan bouts – Mr. Obama’s arch-rivals and outright political enemies had synchronously guaranteed that the “anomaly” of his racial identity, particularly the Black-African aspect of his identity, would be fore-grounded as the central issue of the national referendum. It is also significant to point out that, perhaps, Mr. Obama’s most dangerous detractors were Messrs. Alan Keyes and Henry Louis Gates., Jr., the man whose avoidable fracas with a Cambridge, Ma., police officer diligently about the business of protecting the lives and property of his precinct’s residents, nearly wreaked the havoc of an equally avoidable leadership crisis. On this occasion, rather than studiously wait for all the facts surrounding an apparently mistaken burglary report to be garnered and collated, the often witty President Obama would hastily draw his own, perhaps experience-based, conclusions by impugning the judgment of both the arresting officers and their colleagues in general. Also significant to observe herein is the fact that the Harvard-based Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is widely alleged to have endorsed then-Candidate Obama’s arch-rival, and some keen observers have even suggested “one-time fierce political nemesis,” in the Democratic primaries. But that Mr. Obama would graciously and publicly declare Prof. Gates as “a friend” and on the apparently tenuous strength of such friendship impugn the judgment of the Cambridge police was rather unfortunate. This is because in letters that Prof. Gates, and another female “mutt” Harvard colleague, wrote purporting to protect the academic access and integrity of “indigenous” African-Americans against the criminally predatory incursion of immigrant Afro-Caribbeans and continental Africans, and widely circulated among administrators of America’s flagship academies, the foremost Black literary theorist – now Prof. Gates proudly claims, via the strength of DNA evidence, that he is only about 20- or 30-percent “African” – counseled the drastic reduction in the admission of non-American-born people of African descent, in order to protect an endangered “indigenous” African-American species. What the preceding implies is that Columbia and Harvard universities egregiously erred in allowing the now-President Obama into their ivy-carpeted portals. Indeed, it is not known how Prof. Gates privately and inwardly feels about the presidency of Mr. Obama, a non-indigenous – or non-cotton-picking – African citizen of the United States, at least as Mr. Obama is officially classified. Not that it really matters, anyhow. For his part, the stereotypically Black and conservative Republican, fast-talking Dr. Alan Keyes would abruptly change addresses, board the red-eye from Maryland to Illinois and literally attempt to thoroughly abort the senatorial ambitions of “this Black man who does not, in any way, manner, shape or form look like me.” He would invidiously add, “The people of Illinois have personally petitioned me to come over and rescue them from this undeserving outsider with dubious credentials.” In sum if Senator Reid, who is up for reelection in Nevada this November, appears to be badly trailing his political rivals and opponents in the polls, it is hardly because of any perception of the Democratic incumbent as being politically incorrect; for none of Mr. Reid’s Republican rivals are known to be firebrand civil rights activists and advocates. It may simply be a matter of the authors of “Game Change” promoting their own financial and/or ideological agenda or that of their paymasters, especially with the release of their book coming on the heels of a bitterly fought and badly compromised healthcare bill and policy, however forward-looking the latter may be compared to its antecedents. Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008): E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.