Open Thread for Friday Night Owls & Early Birds

Los Angeles Times Columnist Joel Stein writes:

A black president? Seen a few

A lot of liberals say they’re not supporting Barack Obama in the primaries because an African American can’t carry the South in the general election — which is a liberal’s clever way of saying that he won’t vote for a black person. But, it seems, they’re wrong. Because while Iowa and New Hampshire aren’t technically in the South, they are full of hicks, which is what rich liberals actually mean when they refer to “the South.” You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they’re saying. You’ll never believe what they mean by “middle class.” They mean themselves.

America is ready for a black president because we’ve seen them before. Black presidents, in fact, have been our awesomest presidents ever: Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact” and Dennis Haysbert in “24.” And their approval ratings — box office grosses and Nielsen ratings, the only approval that matters in the U.S. — have been huge. The Freeman and Haysbert administrations, which endured Carter-level challenges such as a comet headed toward Earth and working with Kiefer Sutherland, have specifically prepared us for Obama. Like him, they confront without being confrontational.

If there is a choice between winning a culture war or a political war, take the cultural one. Sure, the blunt force of the law can make something happen quickly — unless the law equivocates to make only three-fifths of something happen, or to just not ask and not tell — but culture affects how people think, which is how real change occurs. You can only send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., so many times, but Norman Lear can make people see the absurdity of racism every week. “Will & Grace” did as much for gay rights as Stonewall, although less amusingly. …

Freeman, another Obama campaign contributor, was born in 1937 and grew up in Mississippi, never thinking we could possibly have a black president. But after 1998’s “Deep Impact,” Freeman says, white people told him, too, that they wished he were really president.

Overnight News Digest offers some reading material.