This isn’t an isolated issue, blacks began to question the “character quotient” of Barack Obama before the election.

“Jeff Johnson knows how to make his audiences squirm. The young, black radio and TV political commentator waits for the discussion to turn to the topic being talked about ceaselessly, incessantly, ad nauseam: the meaning of the barrier-breaking election of Barack Obama.

Then, in his laid-back style, he says, “The real issue for me is that history is not enough.” That’s when the mood becomes tense.

“Black folks, in particular, get irritated,” says Johnson, who travels the lecture circuit, hosts a half-hour show on Black Entertainment Television and has a weekly spot for social criticism on a radio program popular with black listeners. Get past “Obama the personality” and see “Obama the president,” he says. “Otherwise all you’re being is a political-celebrity groupie instead of a citizen. . . . It starts with acknowledging he’s my president, and not my homie.”

Of course this is a veiled call for Obama to become more radically black and enact legislation that reflects their views. But more than anything, as I’ve outlined before, blacks are fearful that Obama might just screw things into the ground and set them back. Smiley notes:

“If President Obama succeeds, there is the chance that we will have another person of color as president. If he succeeds, there is the chance that we will at some point have a woman as president. But if he fails . . . it may be another 400 years before we get another African American president,”

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