No, we don’t (smoke cigarettes together). But first thing that happens is, I come in and he’ll say, ‘Boehner, you are almost as dark as me.’ John Boehner to Sean Hannity

If we look at the skin color of John Boehner and Barack Obama, there’s not much difference, except one is a little more orange than the other.  For President Obama melanin is the darkening agent, for Speaker Boehner I think it’s the tanning booths on which his House passed a tax a few years ago, and as for McConnell, nothing, just soapy white.  Nonetheless, it seems to me that the melanin in the President’s skin has become the nexus of many of the ills that face our nation today.

For instance, Sen. McConnell said on Day One, “Our intention is to make this President a one term President.”  Fail.  Since that day and every day since these two elected officials have made it their business to defeat, discredit and deflate the actual presidency and in particular this man.  It seems that anything that could possibly be construed as allowing for a positive legacy of the President is strictly off limits.

We all have our theories about why this might be so. One that I subscribe to is that the base of the GOP right now wants to insure that come 2014 the Democrats have nothing but a sketchy, incomplete agenda on which to run.  It’s felt that this will enable the Republicans to retake the Senate, secure the House and totally emasculate the programs endorsed by Mr. Obama.  And the secret weapon, take the courts for the right wing of the political spectrum.

While all this is well and good and understandable from a policital perspective, what it is doing to the country is cynical and harmful. While most of the opposition will say that this is not about race, I contend that if Obama were a little lighter on the melanin, things would be different.  It’s estimated that the unnecessary and untimely austerity and sequester have cost the country 2.2 million jobs while the wealthiest people in the country, many donors to the GOP, are doing very well indeed.

War is being waged on working class and middle class people in this country, amazingly on the very backs of many of the voters who are hurt and will be hurt the worst.  And all this, at least in no small part, is because of the pigmentation of a man’s skin. Are we not past that yet in this country?  I’m sure many disagree with me, like at least 49%, but as a political science major and student of politics all my life, it seems there is a large kernel of truth to this hypothesis.