God Save Me: I don't think I can suffer another mention of Barack Obama as long as I live. Here he is, folks, the Great Black Hope of the Democratic Party. He's obviously smart, good, looking, and adept at modulating his liberalism for white audiences, and he seems disinclined to take the route of Al Sharpton or Louie Farrakhan or the Jesses Jackson, as a rabble rouser, hustler, or pimp for the professionally disgruntled. Still, he's not Jesus, after all, despite what TNR's fawning coverage implies.

And this brings me back to a subject I broached around the time I predicted Kerry would pick Edwards and softsoap us all at the convention: Why is the party of blacks and women so white and so male at the top of the ticket? Friends, they don't come any whiter than John Edwards. Except for maybe John Kerry. Imagine either of them actually listening to Wyclef. It would no doubt bring back vivid memories of college-day rumbles with black townies. Oh, wait -- wrong generation. John and John were of the original gotta-have-black-friends generation, a sort of undergrad version of radical chic. (Think Howard Dean, asking for black roomies at Yale, then bragging about his connection to the negro world for the next thirty years.)

It's going to change, I'm sure. The Dems are already philosophically beholden to black voters. Any significant defection would set back the party for the next generation. But at some point the minority vote will start to ask, a little more loudly, "How come you never pick us?"

This is where Obama comes in. The Democrats would never think of saying it, but they really do think that, so far, all the national figure blacks in the party couldn't be trusted with the keys to the 'vette. In Obama, they may have seen someone they can feel comfortable with.

But, by the time he's ready to run, will they have hyped him to death? Made us all sick of him?