Barack Obama: Can’t Relate to Blacks?

Apparently desperate to find some means of increasing his popularity, Illinois Senate candidate Alan Keyes has accused his Democratic rival Barack Obama of not being to "relate" to blacks well enough to represent the interests of black voters. Yes, that sounds like a winning campaign theme.

NBC 5 reports:

During an earlier appearance on a national television talk show, Keyes said Obama can't relate to other blacks because he is not from the same heritage as most African Americans.

Why do you suppose he decided to come up with this? Perhaps it is because the black voters haven’t exactly welcomed him to Illinois: The Chicago Tribune explains:

Keyes ... made his first trip Saturday into the heart of Chicago's black community. Keyes, an African-American, was greeted with a resounding chorus of jeers and boos that bordered on outright hostility. "Go back to Maryland!" and "Down with Keyes!" were the most common refrains. The 75-year-old Billiken parade, which ran south along Martin Luther King Drive from Pershing Road to 55th Street, is touted as the largest African-American parade in the country and the biggest in Chicago.

Just in case this doesn’t work, Keyes has another theme ready: Senators shouldn’t be elected by popular vote, they should be appointed by state legislatures:

"The balance is utterly destroyed when the senators are directly elected because the state government as such no longer plays any role in the deliberations at the federal level," Keyes said at a taping of WBBM Newsradio's "At Issue" program. He said it was one of the reasons "there has been a steady deleterious erosion of the sovereign role of the states." Keyes' Democratic rival, state Sen. Barack Obama of Chicago, issued a statement saying he supports popular election of U.S. senators.

Vote for me and I’ll make sure that you can’t vote for someone like me again because... well, because you can’t be trusted to make the right decisions.

And if they do vote for Keyes, that would prove his point, wouldn’t it?

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