http://www.kentucky.com/749/index.xml News, sports, and entertainment from Kentucky.com en-us Copyright 2008 Kentucky.com Syndicated columnists 60 Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:48:34 EDT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss McClatchy Interactive's Workbench webmaster@kentucky.com http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/429251.html http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/429251.html Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:05 EDT
It was far away. Another country. But the nephew and the uncle always had been close. In fact, the nephew looked so much like the uncle, it astonished people. They used to mug in front of the mirror, the two of them, making the same face, the same squint, the same grin. It was like looking at old and young versions of the same face.

"He's really not my son," the uncle laughingly would tell people of his sister's child. "Believe me, that's not possible."

But as someone once observed, God's way of making sure you love your family is making you all look alike. So they were close, the nephew and the uncle. And the uncle would be there at graduation.

Oh, the nephew added, and could the uncle do the commencement speech?]]> http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/294028.html http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/294028.html Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:20 EST
Last week, at age 82, Richard Knerr died. You probably don't recognize his name. You probably can't pronounce it. He wasn't an actor or a war hero. He cured no diseases. Made no scientific breakthroughs.


In fact, you could say Richard Knerr was about one thing and one thing only: fun. But if you measure a man by what the world would be like without him, here a few things that, minus Knerr, you would never know:


The Hula Hoop.


The Frisbee.
]]> http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/289470.html http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/289470.html Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:44 EST This is more than a "fall from grace," as analysts have called it.
This is a cannon shot.
This is a sonic boom.
This is arguably our most successful female athlete of the last decade, an Olympic and world champion who reigned supreme for years while honing an attractive image, winning races, touting products and loudly denouncing any thought of cheating.
But she was. And she will go to jail. And you know who should be watching this very carefully? Roger Clemens. The star pitcher was screaming his innocence all last week, despite charges in the Mitchell Report that he was injected with steroids numerous times by his personal trainer, Brian McNamee.
Well, you can scream all you want. You can scream lies if you like. But if the government Ñ not "60 Minutes" Ñ starts asking you questions, you better cut to the truth.
Or you can sleep in a cell.
"IÕm very disappointed today," Jones, 32, told reporters after her sentencing, "but as I stood in front of all of you for years in victory, I stand in front of you today."
Say what you will about Jones. When she fesses up, she fesses up. She admitted her lying, admitted her steroid use. She tearfully told a crowd a few months ago, "I have no one to blame but myself for what IÕve done."
This is quite different from what we hear from most baseball players, whose confessions (if they make them) tend to be, "I only took it to recover from an injury" or "I was told it was something else." Clemens has been insisting that his trainer indeed injected him Ñ but not with steroids or human growth hormone, only with B12 and lidocaine. This, despite the fact that most medical people roll their eyes at the idea of injections for either. And the thing is, Clemens can jut his chin out as long as he wants in the private sector.
Because the only words that truly matter anymore are "federal investigators."
Apparently, athletes think nothing of lying to teammates, managers and especially the media. They donÕt mind cycling their use of banned substances to avoid positive tests, or using masking agents so they test negative. They donÕt mind ignoring their commissioner or a former senator trying to conduct an investigation.
The only party that carries any weight is the federal government. You know why? ItÕs the only party that can make lying Ñ aka perjury Ñ a crime.
And so Jones will go to jail Ñ not for using steroids, but for lying about it. And Barry Bonds could face a similar fate Ñ again, not for his body, but for his mouth.
Meanwhile, Mark McGwire, who clammed up before Congress, is a free man. Jose Canseco, who admitted steroid use in a book and countless interviews, is a free man. Andy Pettitte, who confessed to being injected with human growth hormone by ClemensÕ trainer, is a free man. Dozens if not hundreds of others, admitted or suspected, are free men.
And Jones will do six months. What can we conclude from all this? Although I would like to think it shows that steroids arenÕt worth it, or that athletes, as the judge who sentenced Jones claimed, "have an elevated status ... they serve as role models," I fear thatÕs optimistic.
What weÕre learning is to choose your lies carefully and stay away from the feds. The image of Marion Jones sleeping in a cell should send shivers down the sports worldÕs spine. But we canÕt erase the memory of her, defiant and angry, when anyone suggested she was on the juice. Only when she took that hubris to the government did she have to pay.
ThatÕs a long way from putting down the needle on your own.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/751/story/433606.html http://www.kentucky.com/751/story/433606.html Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:02 EDT
In just one week these news bites have crawled across the bottom of the cable news screens:

.. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that suspected terrorist detainees held in the Guantanamo prison camp are entitled to the habeas corpus rights and protection -- access to the federal courts -- that the Bush White House and Congress so assiduously attempted to "white-out" of the Constitution.

Drum-head military courts just won't cut it, the Supremes wrote, and the government cannot turn the Constitution on and off as it chooses. President Bush said he disagreed with the decision but would abide by it -- gracious of him and a very constitutional position itself.

.. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain kept his large crew of spinners, explainers, foot removal specialists and apologists on overtime papering over the daily dose of candidate misstatements, mistakes and callous comments.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/751/story/289505.html http://www.kentucky.com/751/story/289505.html Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:22 EST The unfolding disaster in Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is in part a reaction to a series of inactions and actions by the Bush administration during the last six years.
Bush and Company took their eyes off the ball and became preoccupied with the sideshow of their own creation in Iraq as things went sideways and backward in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then they outsourced much of the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
After the attacks on America on 9/11, President Bush quite rightly took aim at al-Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan that was sheltering the terrorist group responsible for those attacks.
A relatively small group of U.S. special operators rented enough tribal leaders and their armies and, backed by American air power, were able to topple the Taliban government and put al-Qaeda on the run. A force of only 7,000 U.S. Army and Marine troops went in to chase the bad guys.
So far, so good, or so it seemed. But the administration declared victory prematurely . a bad habit it would repeat elsewhere . and turned many of its resources and most of its attention to invading Iraq while Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership escaped into Pakistan.
Benign neglect is a dangerous policy in the badlands along the Afghan-Pakistani border, where the bleached bones of invading armies litter the mountain passes and the inhospitable deserts. Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of the British Indian Army, had this to say on the subject:
"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
"And the women come out to cut up your remains,
"Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
"And go to your God like a soldier."

Job One was Afghanistan, but it was left undone, too unimportant a
backwater for the foreign policy amateurs, neo-conservative ideologues and military dilettantes advising the president. A pre-emptive invasion of Iraq and the toppling of a hated dictator in the heart of the Middle East . a cheap, easy and quick cakewalk . was what we needed.
Never mind that we'd chased a bunch of fanatical terrorists into a part of Pakistan that no central government has ever conquered or controlled. We'd just throw $10 billion to PakistanÕs military dictator and get him to take care of our problem, as if he didn't have enough problems of his own dealing with Islamist fanatics.
Now both Afghanistan and Pakistan are coming unraveled, and are likely to become two more disasters added to the growing list of "things to do" in the disaster department that President George W. Bush will hand to his unlucky successor in the White House a year from now.
Afghanistan is a mess. We installed a weak central government whose writ doesn't run much beyond the city limits of Kabul and starved it of the aid needed to repair a nation ravaged by three decades of war and civil war. The Soviet Union sent 100,000 troops to wage unlimited and barbaric war and was defeated. By contrast, we have 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and weÕve browbeaten our reluctant NATO allies into sending an additional 50,000, many of whom are under orders from home not to take risks or get anyone killed.
The Taliban guerrillas, operating from safe havens in PakistanÕs rugged frontier province, are on the march. They've learned from the war in Iraq, and their IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and suicide bombers are taking a deadly toll. More American troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2007 than in any year since 2002.
In Pakistan, the radical madrassas are churning out recruits for the Taliban and al-Qaeda faster than the allies and the Afghan army can kill them, and every time weÕve pushed Gen. Musharraf to send his soldiers in to clean out the sanctuaries, most of them have been killed or captured.
The administrationÕs solution: Force Musharraf to take off his uniform and enter into an unholy alliance of sorts with the long-exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whose time in power was marked mainly by an explosion of corruption remarkable even in a country where corruption is endemic.
It's no surprise that she was killed. She was buried next to her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, another smooth talking, Western-educated darling of the foreigners, who was hanged by a previous military dictator.
All this might be of little interest if only Pakistan didn't have a cellar full of nuclear warheads. Real nuclear weapons, unlike the imaginary nuclear weapons program our leaders brandished as a reason to invade Iraq or the one they trotted out to turn up the heat on Iran . until the intelligence community pulled the rug out from under that crusade.
All of it is so complicated it must make George W. Bush's head hurt.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/446876.html http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/446876.html Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:21 EDT
It was such a good story: Teen girls make pregnancy pact.

What?! No!! America's presses didn't exactly screech to a halt, but the media lapped up the story, with reporters descending on tiny Gloucester, Mass., from as far away as Brazil and Poland.

Teens making a pact to get pregnant enjoyed several news cycles not because it was so unbelievable, but because it was, alas, so believable.

And because it's summer. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/440568.html http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/440568.html Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:06 EDT
Yet with the gritty determination of a committed obsessive-compulsive, I plowed through an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine expose on the current state of gender equity in the American home: "When Mom and Dad Share It All."

Apparently, men and women are still not equal partners. In fact, they're so unequal that they're more or less stuck in the same trends of 90 years ago, despite our best efforts to get men to be better women and women to be better men.

Alas, still foiled.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households indicate that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week compared to the average husband's 14. When wives stay home, they do 38 hours of housework a week compared to men's 12.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/437967.html http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/437967.html Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:05 EDT
That America's fathers need to embrace their most important role is no secret. Activist fathers have been trying to make the same claim for decades, without much success.

Not all fathers are trying to be good dads, it goes without saying. But neither are all absent by choice, as Obama's message implied.

His plea to fathers came on Father's Day, a time we usually reserve for praising good men. Noting the plague of fatherless homes, he called on fathers who have abandoned their responsibilities to act like men, not boys.

Hear, hear.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/426928.html http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/426928.html Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:04 EDT
There seems no stopping Barack Obama, not solely because of his obvious appeal but because who really wants to be the one who stands athwart history yelling "Stop!" when this particular history is so compelling?

And so charged.

It is compelling, no matter one's politics. Watching Obama give his celebration speech Tuesday night, I became aware that I was smiling. I slapped myself, of course, but the fool thing wouldn't go away.

It is hard not to smile when Obama is smiling, but it was more than the animal impulse to mimicry. It was simply satisfying to witness the birth of this new political offspring after centuries of labor. We were all midwives in that moment. Bravo.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/449446.html http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/449446.html Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:42 EDT
I have no idea when reverence fled these shores. That it did, however, seems obvious.

What else can you conclude when the service of military men becomes a routine object of mockery and misinformation in the name of politics? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John McCain: traitor.

In most quarters, of course, the senator is regarded as anything but. In those quarters, he is a war hero, having survived more than five years of beatings, solitary confinement and deprivation in a Vietnamese prison camp, even refusing an offer of early release because it meant leaving fellow prisoners behind.

But John Aravosis, who blogs on Americablog.com, has a different take. In a posting Sunday, he accused McCain of .disloyalty. because at one point, his captors tortured him into reading a propaganda statement. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/446875.html http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/446875.html Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:21 EDT
So all we know for sure is that something happened in Gloucester, Mass.

What that something was depends on whom you believe.

Last week on its Web site, Time magazine quoted Gloucester High principal Dr. Joseph Sullivan as saying that of 17 girls who became pregnant during the school year, nearly half did so as part of a .pact. to have and raise their babies together.

Sue Todd, president of a group that runs a day care at the school, told Time she had heard a similar story from a social worker. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/440605.html http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/440605.html Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:06 EDT
That person -- he or she will be white -- will be unable to point to so much as a semicolon that suggests I believe in the native superiority of my, or any other, race. Rather, the accusation will be based in the fact that the column discusses race, period.

It's a phenomenon I've seen many times, most recently when a friend of mine told me that a friend of hers regards me as racist because I write about race. To which I gave my standard answer: If that's how it works, I'll start writing about money. Then I'll be a billionaire.

I offer the foregoing as a gesture of solidarity with an elementary school teacher in California who wrote to ask my opinion of two incidents that happened in her class.

In the first, a white boy -- we'll call him Bobby -- disagreed with a black boy. The black boy, who had been explaining something about his family to the teacher, told Bobby he would not understand because he was white. Bobby said this was racist.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/437968.html http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/437968.html Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:05 EDT
A sign affixed to the bird -- a statue of a rooster in full crow -- said: "Brought in by a Santeria priest ... to help save our jobs. Make an offering."

The bird, placed last week on a bank of file cabinets in The Miami Herald newsroom, drew flowers, wine, pennies, peppermint, dolls, candles and other oblations. A few days later, McClatchy Co., which owns the Herald and 30 other newspapers around the country, announced it was cutting 10 percent of its work force. At the Herald, that means 190 jobs throughout the newspaper's various departments.

So if Santeria -- it's a combination of Catholicism and the West African Yoruba religion -- has any miracles to work, it had better get busy.

Not that the Herald is alone. Virtually every newspaper is going through the same thing: shrinking profit margins, declining circulation, staff cutbacks and morale at subterranean levels as journalists struggle to figure out how we can save the American newspaper.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/437969.html http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/437969.html Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:05 EDT
I've appeared occasionally on Meet the Press, and this year I often worked with Russert on MSNBC's election coverage. Since last Friday, when Russert suffered a heart attack while preparing for Sunday's show, I've been stopped a number of times by people I don't know -- in the street, in the supermarket, at a restaurant -- who extended condolences as if a member of my own family had passed away. I've gotten e-mails from friends and strangers saying they were touched by Russert's passing in a way that surprised them.

The temptation is to chalk this up to Russert's great skill as a broadcaster -- effortlessly projecting his personality through the screen. As friends, colleagues and the subjects (or victims) of his interviews have attested, he was a great guy. At this point, after a weekend of non-stop tributes, it would be self-indulgent for me to add my own litany of personal recollections and unadulterated hosannas. Suffice it to say that he deserved it all.

But why such a huge reaction? I think it's not just because of who Russert was, but also the role he carved out for himself as a kind of ombudsman -- the mediator not just of a TV show, but of a weekly dialogue between the public and the political establishment.

In an age of postmodern irony, there was nothing remotely postmodern or ironic about Russert -- or, for that matter, about his TV show. His Meet the Press presented the nation's political discourse as we would like it to be: sober yet good-natured, always civil, scrupulously informed. The show flattered guests and their subject matter by taking them seriously and, by extension, flattered the millions of viewers who reliably tuned in every Sunday morning by taking them seriously as well.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/432505.html http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/432505.html Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:04 EDT
But the president in question, sigh, is George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays in clearing brush at his Texas ranch.

So Thursday, for the third and apparently final time, the high court made clear that the Decider has no authority to trash the foundational principles of American jurisprudence. In ruling 5-4 that foreigners held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in federal court, the court cited the Constitution and the centuries-old concept of habeas corpus.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion seems broad enough and definitive enough to end the Kafkaesque farce at Guantanamo once and for all.

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Kennedy wrote. Again, it's amazing that any president would need to have such a basic concept spelled out for him.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/431474.html http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/431474.html Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:03 EDT
It's no secret that I've found plenty of fault with the way Clinton, her staff and her husband ran their campaign. But I can't find a thing wrong with the way she ended it, delivering a gracious and stirring address beneath the soaring, faux-marble columns of the National Building Museum. She chose one of Washington's grandest interior spaces for her valedictory, and her words lived up to the setting.

All morning, the Republican National Committee had been sending out e-mails highlighting the nasty things Clinton and Obama had said about each other and predicting that "Democrat Party disunity" would sweep John McCain to victory. Republicans must have been hoping that Clinton would reprise her performance of last Tuesday night, when she failed to acknowledge that Obama had clinched the nomination.

The intensity of the campaign and the divisions it created were evident Saturday when, well into the speech, Clinton first mentioned her opponent's name, calling on supporters to "take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States." There were cheers, but also some boos.

Clinton went on to praise Obama, but not in terms so lavish that she might have sounded disingenuous -- it was, after all, a heated campaign that got personal at times -- and proceeded to build a cogent argument for party unity.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/426929.html http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/426929.html Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:04 EDT
A young black first-term senator -- a man whose father is from Kenya, whose mother is from Kansas and whose name sounds as if it might have come from the roster of Guantanamo detainees -- has won a marathon of primaries and caucuses to become the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

To reach this point, he had to do more than outduel the party's most powerful and resourceful political machine. He also had to defy, and ultimately defeat, 389 years of history.

It was in 1619 that the first Africans were brought in chains to these shores, landing in Jamestown, Va. Ever since -- through the War of Independence, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the great migration to Northern cities and the civil rights struggle -- race has been one of the great themes running through our nation's history.

I'm old enough to remember when Americans with skin the color of mine and Obama's had to fight -- and die -- for the right to participate as equals in the life of the nation we helped build.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/750/story/294986.html http://www.kentucky.com/750/story/294986.html Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:55 EST
The outrage is unrelenting and understandable - but at this point unnecessary.


In October 2006, a 13-year-old St. Louis area girl hanged herself in her bedroom closet after her heart was broken by an online crush. It's a horrible story, but one we would never have heard about but for this salacious fact: The girl, Megan Meier, was the victim of an Internet hoax. "Josh," the boy who captured her attention through messages on MySpace, never existed. He was the fabrication of a neighbor.


In a further twist - and here's the reason this story has stoked a nationwide vigilante campaign - the meddling neighbor was the mother of another teenaged girl. That teenager lived down the street and was once a close friend of Megan.


Remember that: The crux of this sad story is a soured friendship between two young girls.
]]> http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/437966.html http://www.kentucky.com/752/story/437966.html Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:05 EDT
My sweet, old grandfather came down from heaven recently, just in time to join me at the airport. He'd been gone for years, so a plane trip had him excited.

"Why aren't you wearing a suit and tie?" he asked. "This is an airplane, not a bus."

Planes aren't a big deal anymore, Gramps.

"Pooh. You fly in the sky, it's a big deal."]]> http://www.kentucky.com/751/story/440022.html http://www.kentucky.com/751/story/440022.html Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:06 EDT
You see, his father, Sgt. Tomas Taguba, was a soldier in the famed Philippine Scouts and was, briefly, a prisoner of the Japanese after Bataan fell in the opening days of our war in the Pacific. Tomas Taguba escaped during the Death March and spent the next three years spying on the Japanese and relaying the information to U.S. forces.

After the war, the senior Taguba was allowed to enlist in the U.S. Army and served honorably and unsung until his retirement. His son was born in Manila in 1950 but grew up as American as apple pie, earned an ROTC commission at Idaho State University and was only the second Filipino-American to attain the rank of general in our Army.

Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba would undergo his own trial by fire when, in 2004, he was named by the Pentagon to conduct a carefully walled-in investigation of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

By regulation -- and no doubt by the design of those who appointed him -- Taguba could not investigate any uniformed or civilian official whose rank was higher than his own two stars.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/449535.html http://www.kentucky.com/754/story/449535.html Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:17 EDT
Being shot down may not qualify one to be president, as retired Gen. Wesley Clark infamously said recently, but what men do under fire might tell us about the character we may discover in a president.

Clark's precise words, aimed at undermining John McCain's executive experience, were: .I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.. In fairness, Clark also praised McCain's heroism, saying that he honored his service as a prisoner of war and even that .he was a hero to me..

Predictably, Republicans were outraged, and Democrats were outraged at the GOP's outrage. For his part, Barack Obama performed the political minuet of condemn 'n' distance. He condemned the remarks and distanced himself from his surrogate.

McCain made a few tepid remarks, but mostly let others put Clark in his place. And, although McCain is clearly content to use the iconic image of his younger pilot self for campaign purposes, he also has shrugged off his heroism. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/452101.html http://www.kentucky.com/753/story/452101.html Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:18 EDT
I have no idea when reverence fled these shores. That it did, however, seems obvious.

What else can you conclude when the service of military men becomes a routine object of mockery and misinformation in the name of politics? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John McCain: traitor.

In most quarters, of course, the senator is regarded as anything but. In those quarters, he is a war hero, having survived more than five years of beatings, solitary confinement and deprivation in a Vietnamese prison camp, even refusing an offer of early release because it meant leaving fellow prisoners behind.

But John Aravosis, who blogs on Americablog.com, has a different take. In a posting Sunday, he accused McCain of .disloyalty. because at one point, his captors tortured him into reading a propaganda statement. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/449429.html http://www.kentucky.com/755/story/449429.html Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:27 EDT
George W. Bush's presidency seems exhausted and irrelevant, but that's a dangerous illusion. The Decider remains in command of the world's most advanced and powerful military force, and he has just a few months to tie up what he might consider loose ends . a thought sobering enough to send Amy Winehouse to rehab.

We can only hope he considers his .denuclearization. agreement with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il a sufficient legacy. Assuming the deal keeps North Korea from making more nuclear weapons, Bush will be 1-for-3 in dealing with his Axis of Evil. (If you ignore the fact that Pyongyang went nuclear on Bush's watch, that is.)

As for the other Evils, we know the story: Iraq is a bloody quagmire that has claimed more than 4,000 American lives, and Iran is more powerful than at any time since the fall of the shah.

Bush's legacy on the world stage is defined by Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons and waterboarding. His successor will face an enormous task restoring America's image and moral standing. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/750/story/426930.html http://www.kentucky.com/750/story/426930.html Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:04 EDT
Yes, I'm thinking about what an Obama White House would be like. What it would mean for race relations, of course, is the easiest aspect to assess. How Obama would handle the meatier and far more crucial issues is not so easily surmised -- stabilizing the economy, reforming the health care system, appointing new Supreme Court justices, ending the war in Iraq and protecting us from terrorist attacks.

Those presidential duties will call for savvy and guts on Obama's part. He'll have to choose astute advisers and then have the sense to listen to them.

On race, however, Obama only has to show up. That's how it works to be the "first" minority to achieve any high-profile role. It is a strange phenomenon. Simply by standing in a space long held by the same sorts of people -- namely, white men -- something shifts in the cosmos. Years ago, when Kansas City elected its first black mayor, Emanuel Cleaver (now a member of Congress), some compared his impact on city race relations to the effect a teacher has by standing on the playground at recess. The kids play differently -- more nicely. Point being that simply being in the room takes things up a notch.

Certain things aren't said. Other things are said better, where race and class are concerned. The fact is that, as far as race goes, Obama would make strides for the nation by simply being there; he wouldn't even have to address the issue formally, although I suspect he would.]]>