What Joe Biden might have meant

I suspect that there is something about Barack Obama which has yet to be mentioned, and might never quite be said out loud, but which will matter a very great deal: he is not in fact a member of the highly distinctive mixed-race, primarily West African slave-descended people that was concentrated heavily in the South until the middle of the twentieth century, and which then spread throughout the United States. In that technical sense, he is not an "African-American" at all.

Whether or not that was what an insider like Joe Biden meant when he implictly described Obama as more acceptable than past black contenders (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al), nevertheless that is what a lot of people will have heard, and I suspect are going to keep on hearing.

Jim "How We Scotch-Irish Made America" Webb, where is your socially conservative, economically populist, anti-war African-American running mate? There are plenty of such people to choose from.