itterness and nastiness is the name of the game.  Even the pretense of truth and goodwill has taken a back seat to bitterness and nastiness.  That aptly characterizes the political life in America.  America has survived many things.  However, I do not whether it will or can survive the bitterness and nastiness that has come to be definitive of the political life.  I would, in fact, be surprised if it could.

America has become the country that values freedom above all except when things go wrong, then it is necessarily someone else fault—the fault of the system.  Bitterness and viciousness contribute mightily to this approach.  And this mindset has become characteristic of American politics. 

So in America people should be free to eat whatever they choose.  Yet, fast food restaurants are to blame for the problem of obesity—and not the individuals who frequent those restaurants.  I may be missing something, but to the best of my knowledge no one—not even poor people—have to frequent a fast food restaurant.  Indeed, it is an insult to the poor even to suggest that cannot fathom that eating 2 big Macs, or whatever, day after day will result in weight gain unless one is an extraordinarily active person. 

As for the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the simple truth is that all sorts of people are to blame; and this includes many of the homebuyers themselves who were greedy and who made irresponsible decisions.  One does not have to like President George Bush at all in order to resist, and correctly so, the view that his administration bears sole responsibility for this. 

The strength of the United States was tied to two precepts: One was commonsense.  The other was the willingness to take responsibility for one’s mistakes.  The essay “The Death of Common Sense” by Lori Borgman is so very on point. 

Parents want their children to be educated; yet, these very same parents will not accept that a school should be able to discipline their children.  And it is simply common sense that where discipline is absent in a school so will learning be absent.  Of course, anything can be abused including discipline.  Just so, refusing discipline altogether is surely not the right response to cases where there is an abuse of discipline.  That would be rather like supposing that the proper response to an airplane or a car accident is to eliminate airplane flying or driving altogether. 

I said at the beginning that I doubt whether or not the United States can survive its bitterness and viciousness.  And the 2008 presidential election puts that concern into stark relief.  This is because it is way too easy to blame whites should Obama not win the presidential race.  The presuppositions behind this thinking are stunning. 

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama holds moral views with which a reasonable person could disagree—views with which a reasonable black person could disagree.  Indeed, some blacks publicly did just that at recent speech given by Obama at the University of Miami.

One does not have to be an Uncle Tom in order to be a black who disagrees with Obama.  It follows from this that a black does not have to be an Uncle Tom in order not to place having a black president above all else in terms of importance.  Yet, bitterness and viciousness will not allow a great many people to acknowledge this reality. 

Thus, there are blacks who label blacks as Uncle Toms for not taking a pro-Obama stance and whites as racists for not taking a pro-Obama stance.  No doubt there are whites who think the same way about whites.  I need not point out that there is no easy way to defeat the charge that one is either an Uncle Tom or a racist.  And that is part of what makes either charge so vicious. 

While I take to be obvious that there blacks who are Uncle Toms and whites who are racists, I also think that the very nature of these labels require that they be used with great circumspection—and not simply as a means of getting one’s way. 

When the charge of racism becomes none other than a vehicle for success, then what we have a most destructive level of viciousness and bitterness.   Welcome to America.

This brings me to a profound difference between Barack Obama and John McCain.  Obama is an extremely intelligent man, and so he knows very well that in point of fact he can play, and is playing, the race card.  He knows that he can be vicious in attacking McCain in a way that McCain may simply not be in attacking Obama.  What is more, precisely what we all know is that in this regard the media can be a marvelous ally to Obama in this regard. 

In effect, then, we have a most bitter and vicious undercurrent to this presidential election that does not bode well for the American society.  So it is if people are poised to make the charge of racism simply in virtue of the fact that Obama should lose the election. 

What does Barack Obama think about all of this?  Well, precisely because he is a very smart man, it is at the very least interesting that he has not in any whatsoever allowed for the possibility that he could lose the election without this being owing to racism.  Neither he nor Michelle Obama has.  There is a way of speaking to this issue that would be extraordinarily healing to this nation.  And neither has made this moral gesture.  As Alice Walker, the author of the novel The Color Purple, made so poignantly clear: Sometimes what a person does not say tells as much if not more than what the person actually says. 

If from the very start, they have supposed that the only explanation for their not winning is racism, then quite simply they are playing the race card.  What is more, they are doing so with extraordinary arrogance.  Being black entitles them to equality not the presidency.  And that is how they should present themselves.