People keep forgetting Dennis Haysbert. That is people who happen to think that I'm a one-man wackjob army of weird conservativeness. It's actually rather easy to forget Dennis Haysbert, that's because he is the invisibly integrated archtype of the kind of black American that gets no political press. But just in case you need to be reminded, America would vote for David Palmer in a heartbeat.
I still haven't read the first page of Barack Obama's book but I will get around to it. I don't suspect to find much of the good Senator's rhetoric that would endear me to him or his political cause, but I expect that he will acquit himself well. We knew the personality before we knew the book, and so this is his little 'Profiles in Courage'. Be all that as it may, I don't find Obama to be the man this country need today. But to the extent that Obama is serving as a placeholder for the willingness of America to elect a black man to the office of the President, I'd say he's a weak substitute for Dennis Haysbert.
The fictional David Palmer, and more recently The Unit's Jonas Blane are characterizations of a kind of heroic American we are often told don't exist or are marginalized by omnipresent corruption. I don't believe in such fatalism, so I'm not desperate to extol the virtues of the characters he portrays. Rather, I'm simply reminding folks not to forget Dennis Haysbert, because as far as I can tell, he's walking right into John Wayne's shoes.
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