Barack Obama Doesn't Care About Black People!

Barack Obama, lucky in his enemies.

[Rev. Al] Sharpton strongly urged the nearly 10,000 people who filled Hampton University's Convocation Center not to select a candidate next year just because they want to see an African-American or a woman or a Hispanic in the White House for the first time.

Without naming Obama, Sharpton added that "just because you're our color doesn't make you our kind." He pointed to President Bush's secretaries of State, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, as examples of African-Americans he said haven't necessarily worked in the interest of the African-American community.

Sharpton also chided Obama for making his presidential announcement in Springfield rather than before the predominantly African-American audience at Hampton, and said the Illinois senator needs to declare "what's his embrace of our agenda."

Indeed, accused of not playing the race card enough by Al Sharpton. If he hasn't already, Obama should really find the appropriate Vermont Teddy Bear for the occasion and send it Al's way.

Seriously, this is stupid. Insofar as Obama has any record, it's as a state senator who worked on (broadly defined) civil rights issues. He wrote an anti-racial profiling law, requiring police to record the ethnicity of everyone they pulled over so the figures could be studied and corrected. He wrote another one requiring interogations and confessions to be videotaped to avoid coercion, which—incredibly!—happened sometimes in Chicago. He opposed "the way the death penalty is administered in this country," meaning "hey, how come all those black guys are on death row?" (He also fought to ban ephedra, so let's not go crazy about his awesome legislative career.) I was living in Illinois during Obama's Senate race and heard all about this stuff; Republicans were going to use it to paint him as soft on crime, before they imploded and couldn't find a candidate to run against him.

Even if you loathe Obama, there's something to this. He springing a trap door under the Sharptons et al; the "civil rights" leaders who combine doctrinaire liberalism with lots and lots of race baiting.