Politics

Virginia :The winds of change are blowing in Virginia. Even in my nearly all-white, heavily Republican neighborhood just outside Richmond, Obama yard signs and bumper stickers have appeared. Going into Election Day, Obama is up 50 percent to 44 percent in Pollster.com’s most recent compilation and is drawing enormous, enthusiastic crowds not only in Richmond,…

In the two years since Sen. Barack Obama announced his bid for the presidency, black Americans have been on an emotional roller coaster. Only recently have many of us allowed ourselves to envision what once seemed impossible: A U.S. president who is a person of color. With Obama leading in national pre-election polls, the suspense…

“I know where to go…I know what to do…” —Ready For The World It’s getting late—have you made up your mind? Here’s one last thing for you undecided voters to consider. As soon as the next president is sworn in, he’s going to have a waiting room full of folks with global problems to deal…

My mom has never had a black person as a peer. What I mean is, she’s been around black people all of her life, but—besides a brief period in grad school—her social surroundings have made it so that she’s never really had black friends, colleagues, bosses or boyfriends. And I’m beginning to suspect that it’s…

Whether he wins or loses, Barack Obama has proven one thing: You no longer need to have a perm or take a trip to the seminary to make it on the national political scene. But for every step forward, the presidential contender has won for the race in the endless 2008 campaign, some kooky colored…

As our country prepares to make history next week, I have been thinking a lot about race. My father came to America from Bangladesh to pursue his education and a better life, just like Obama’s father. He expected that hard work would be rewarded. Like other immigrant families we rarely discussed race; it was assumed…

We communicate daily in languages we didn’t grow up speaking. We have learned to adapt to cultures that have not entirely adopted us. Barack Obama might call us, as he has himself, “citizens of the world.” But for Americans living abroad, it’s our chance at changing the world as American citizens that is calling many…

Mix’ology: noun. The art and science of mixings In these final days of this presidential campaign, John McCain and his supporters have been trying desperately to raise doubts about Barack Obama’s identity. They have called him a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, an unrepentant liberal. For weeks, their tagline has been “Who is Barack Obama?” The…

After the last presidential debate both Karl Rove and Slate’s “Poll Tracker” electoral maps projected that Sen. Obama would win the presidency with 313 electoral votes if the election was held that day. This would be a massive Electoral College victory for Sen. Obama. On that same day, the Associated Press reported that perhaps as…

OK, we get it. Barack Obama has piles of money. Crazy money! Appearing on “The Daily Show” last night, he was asked to describe the unusual media buy that took over network television for half an hour in prime time Wednesday. “This is the Obama infomercial,” he said. And it was. If nothing else, the…