CINCINNATI—If any candidate for president ever demonstrated that he had guts, it was John McCain when he dared to appear before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It’s unlikely that the Arizona senator has faced a crowd so skeptical since he confronted his torturers in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp during the…

Poor John McCain. He must be asking himself, “How am I supposed to follow that?” That, of course, is Barack Obama’s rousing appearance at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati Monday night. When McCain delivers his own speech to the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization on Wednesday morning, the ovation Obama triggered may still…

I hate to say this, but unless President Barack Obama toughens up pretty soon, his presidency could be in trouble.  It’s too early to be sure, but the warning signs are beginning to accumulate. If unemployment, now at 9.5 percent, keeps rising, Democrats could lose House and Senate seats in the midterm elections next year, and, though…

On one level, it is easy to dismiss the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.’s crudely worded metaphorical threat to castrate Barack Obama for supposedly talking down to black people as the raving of an increasingly irrelevant, former big shot suffused with resentment at the rising star who pushed him off stage. That, after all, is the…

Political scientists investigating why the Republican Party attracts so little support from black voters don’t need to look farther than the extraordinary fashion in which GOP leaders have reacted to the death of former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms on the Fourth of July. The possibility that a black man might actually be elected president…

Is America ready to elect a black president? We’ll find out in November. Barack Obama’s candidacy poses an unprecedented sociological experiment. Everything about us, including how far we’ve come toward the creation of the more perfect union in which people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin,…

What if Bobby Kennedy’s bodyguard Roosevelt Grier had spotted the gun a few moments earlier and wrestled Sirhan Sirhan to the floor before he could fire the fatal shot? What if Kennedy hadn’t died only a few hours after he won the 1968 California Democratic primary, but had gone on to win the nomination and…

Lawd, have mercy! They said pigs would fly, fish would whistle and lost souls would be shivering in hell before a major political party anointed a presidential standard bearer who is not only black but actually dances like one. Well, those wonders may not have occurred, but I’ve been sweeping up shards from the glass…

Give Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt. She was not, as she explained, suggesting that she was staying in the race because something horrible might happen to Barack Obama, the man who is denying her bid for the White House. She was only citing an example of a presidential-nominating contest that went into June…